AHS+Summer+2008

While his mother and father help a family of African refugees, Jared learns that the people he counts on for doing good deeds are not always praiseworthy and are faced with a decision which may have implications for all. After rescuing her younger brother abandoned at a busy airport by their divorced father, fifteen-year-old Lily finds her faith isorely tested as she struggles to rescue herself from the bitterness and anger she feels. Anna Bloom, confined to a mental hospital by her parents who do not know how to deal with her depression and panic attacks, writes letters to her best friend Tracy sharing the funny details of her institutionalization and the people she is getting to know at Lakeland. After the mutant Erasers abduct the youngest member of their group, the "birdkids," who are the result of genetic experimentation, take off in pursuit and find themselves struggling to understand their own origins and purpose. After being told that his father was an assassin for a criminal organization, fourteen-year-old Alex goes to Italy to find out more and becomes involved in a plan to kill thousands of English school children. A poetry memoir in which the author tells of the pressures that led her to suffer debilitating anxiety attacks, and the path she took to coping and recovery. A columnist describes her adolescence as a runaway in New York City, explaining why she exchanged her home for life on the city streets, her struggle to balance school, the shelter system, and her battle to rescue herself from street life. The author tells the story of her violent rape at the age of eighteen, her accidental sighting of her attacker six months later, the resulting trial and conviction of the man, and the trauma she suffered for years afterwards. The author presents a tender story of his family's love for their golden retriever, Marley, and recalls how he grew from a mischievous puppy into a nearly impossible adult that no amount of obedience school training could correct, and of the love they felt for him. Fifteen-year-old Tyrell, who is living in a Bronx homeless shelter with his spaced-out mother and his younger brother, tries to avoid temptation so he does not end up in jail like his father.  After spending her summer running the family farm and training the quarterback for her school's rival football team, sixteen-year-old D.J. decides to go out for the sport herself, not anticipating the reactions of those around her. Matt Shaw’s life is out of control and the way he controls it is by walking after school, listening to his iPod. He walks so he doesn't have to go home and deal with his older brother Neal's increasing drug use. He meets Katie online in a chat room, and there is an instant connection. They are having a great relationship walking and talking, as long as Katie doesn't ask any questions about Matt's family. Matt tries to hold secrets inside him with far-reaching and disastrous results . Two thirteen-year-old boys, blood brothers and best friends, get drawn into a dangerous, violent world on the streets of a troubled Colombian city. A novel in vignettes, in which Lakshmi, a thirteen-year-old girl from Nepal, is sold into prostitution in India. In 1911, Turner Buckminster hates his new home of Phippsburg, Maine, but things improve when he meets Lizzie Bright Griffin, a girl from a poor, nearby island community founded by former slaves that the town fathers--and Turner's--want to change into a tourist spot. Two Scottish sisters, living on the western island of Barra in the 1850s, relate, in alternate voices and linked narrative poems, their experiences after their family is forcibly evicted and separated with one sister accompanying their parents and younger siblings to Cape Breton, Canada, and the other staying behind with other family on the small island of Mingulay.
 * ADVENTURE **
 * Diamonds in the Shadow – Caroline Cooney **
 * A Friend at Midnight – Caroline Cooney **
 * Get Well Soon ** – **Julie Halpern**
 * Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment ** – **James Patterson **
 * Scorpia – Anthony Horowitz **
 * BIOGRAPHY/AUTOBIOGRAPHY **
 * I Don’t Want To Be Crazy – ****Samatha Schutz **
 * Girlbomb – Janice Earlbaum **
 * Lucky – Alice Sebold **
 * Marley & Me – John Grogan **
 * FAMILY MATTERS **
 * Tyrell – Coe Booth **
 * Dairy Queen – Catherine Gilbert Murdock **
 * Falling – Doug Wilhelm **
 * HISTORICAL FICTION/MULTICULTURAL FICTION **
 * Boy Kills Man – Matt Whyman **
 * Sold – Patricia McCormick **
 * Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy – Gary Schmidt **
 * The Braid – Helen Frost **

Unlucky in love, teenager Jack Grammar cannot get a date to prom until his friends play a practical joke and place a personal ad in the school online newspaper on his behalf. Now Jack has twenty-four dates and just seven days until prom. Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Native American is the school mascot. High school senior Leo Caraway, a conservative Republican, learns that his biological father is a punk rock legend. The four best friends, Lena, Carmen, Bridget, and Tibby continue to grow and mature in this great follow up the first three books in the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series. As they leave high school and go in different directions for their first year at college, they discover things about themselves, their family and each other. When his older brother is released from prison, seventeen-year-old Jeff's family secret is revealed, causing upheaval in his home, school and love life. Still reeling from his drug-dealing father's murder, moving in with the wealthy mother he never knew, and transferring to a private school, fifteen-year-old Jude is tricked into pleading guilty to a crime he did not commit. Stuck working in the lost and found department of the Toronto Transit Authority for the summer, seventeen-year-old Duncan finds the diary of a serial killer and sets out to stop him. Seventeen-year-old African-American drug dealer, Ty Johnson, takes over his father's business and struggles to make sense of his life when competition from out of town threatens him and those who are close to him. Instead of telling the truth about why they are home late, fourteen-year-old private school students Emma, Anna, and Mariah lie and say a strange man attacked one of them, and the untruth results in a slew of problems for themselves, their families, their community, and the wrongly accused man. Thirteen-year-old Joey Willis has been deaf since age six, but her mother has refused to let her learn sign language, leaving Joey struggling to connect with those around her until she meets Dr. Charles Mansell and his baby chimpanzee, who secretly teach Joey how to sign. Shortly after her boyfriend Josh is killed in a pledging accident, November Nelson learns she is pregnant and fears she has no one to turn to, until she finds solace in the arms of Josh's cousin Jericho.   Follows the Fort Yukon Eagles high school basketball team from its 2004 preseason to the 2005 Alaskan state championship, while exploring the lives of its players and coach, and examining the six-hundred-person village's Gwich'in Athabascan heritage. Ishmael Beah describes his experiences after he was driven from his home by war in Sierra Leone and picked up by the government army at the age of thirteen, serving as a soldier for three years before being removed from fighting by UNICEF and eventually moving to the United States. Examines the modern candy industry with both objectivity and humor, investigating the influence of corporate power on what sorts of chocolate bars survive and why many "quirky" ones perish. A memoir, presented in graphic novel form, in which the author illustrates her ongoing struggle with an eating disorder she has named Ed. Chronicles the 1955 murder in Money, Mississippi, of Chicago teenager, Emmett Till, by local store owner Roy Bryant and his brother-in-law, J.W. Milam, the trial and acquittal that followed, and how the incident impacted the civil rights movement. As the possessor of Roibin's true name, sixteen-year-old Kaye returns to Faeryland to try and complete a nearly-impossible quest that will release him from the spell of the faery queen who holds him in thrall. A fallen angel, tired of being unappreciated while doing his pointless, demeaning job, leaves Hell, enters the body of a seventeen-year-old boy, and tries to experience the full range of human feelings before being caught and punished, while the boy's family and friends puzzle over his changed behavior. Bella must choose between her friendship with Jacob and her relationship with Edward, both vampires, but when Seattle is ravaged by a mysterious string of killings, the three of them need to decide whether their personal lives are more important than the well-being of an entire city. When the Cullens, including her beloved Edward, leave Forks rather than risk revealing that they are vampires, it is almost too much for eighteen-year-old Bella to bear, but she finds solace in her friend Jacob until he is drawn into a "cult" and changes in terrible ways. Miles barely recalls when football was fun after being sidelined by a new coach, constantly criticized by his father, and pressured by his best friend to take performance-enhancing drugs. While playing in a crucial basketball game on the very court where his best friend was murdered, Mackey tries to come to terms with his own part in that murder and decide whether to maintain his silence or tell J.R.'s father and the police what really happened.  Eighteen-year-old Michael Kerrigan, writer of obituaries for the Scranton Observer and captain of the track team, is ready for the most important season of his life--until the police find four joints in his school locker, and he is faced with a choice that could change everything **. ** Presents a graphic novel adaptation of the Old English epic poem, "Beowulf," in which a Norse hero saves Denmark's royal house from monsters, returns home to become his own people's greatest king, and then faces a murderous dragon to protect them. A graphic memoir about growing up with a remote dad who managed a funeral home while hiding his homosexuality. Contains adult content. A graphic novel about the daily life of a nineteen-year-old girl named Aya living in Yopougon, Africa, during 1978; exploring her relationships with her father, who manages a beer company, and two best friends, who are determined to marry a wealthy man, and her own ambitions to attend college and become a scientist.
 * HUMOR **
 * 24 Girls in 7 Days – Alex Bradley **
 * The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian – Sherman Alexie ; art by Ellen Forney **
 * Born to Rock – Gordon Korman **
 * Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood – ****Ann ****Brashares **
 * MYSTERY/THRILLER **
 * Dark Angel – David Klass **
 * Jude – Kate Morgenroth **
 * Acceleration – Graham McNamee **
 * LIVING TODAY **
 * Street Pharm - Allison Van Diepen **
 * Harmless – Dana Reinhardt **
 * Hurt Go Happy – Ginny Rorby **
 * November Blues – Sharon Draper**
 * NON-FICTION **
 * Eagle Blue – Michael D’Orso **
 * A Long Way Gone – Ishmael Beah **
 * Candy Freak – Steve Almond **
 * Inside Out: a memoir in pictures – Nadia Shivack **
 * The Murder of Emmett Till – David Aretha **
 * SCI-FI/FANTASY **
 * Ironside ** ** : a modern faery's tale – Holly Black **
 * Repossessed – A. M. Jenkins **
 * Eclipse – Stephanie Meyer **
 * New Moon – Stephanie Meyer **
 * SPORTS **
 * Crackback – ** **<span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Arial (W1)'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'">John Coy **
 * Rucker **** Park **** Setup – Paul Volponi **
 * One Good Punch – Rich Wallace **
 * GRAPHIC NOVEL **
 * Beowulf – adapted and illustrated by Gareth Hinds **
 * Fun home : a family tragicomic - Alison Bechdel **
 * Aya – Marguerite Abouet & Clément Oubrerie ; [translation by Helge Dascher]. **