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Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.2 - AR Pts: 8
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Description
It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove -- a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others -- who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8.7 - AR Pts: 27
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Description
Probably Garcia Marquez's finest and most famous work, One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, alive with unforgettable men and women, and with a truth and understanding that strike the soul, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is a masterpiece of the art of fiction.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.9 - AR Pts: 15
Formats
Description
A novel of a dysfunctional family in a Pennsylvania coal-mining town. The mother is in jail for killing the father and the four children are on their own. They are supported by the eldest, Harley Altmyer, 20, who is having an affair with the mother of a friend of his sister.
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A true 20th-century classic from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Sound and the Fury: the famed harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother.
As I Lay Dying is one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama. Narrated in turn by each of the family members, including Addie herself as well as others,...
As I Lay Dying is one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama. Narrated in turn by each of the family members, including Addie herself as well as others,...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.8 - AR Pts: 16
Formats
Description
In the winter of 1919, a young mother named Mathilda Neumann drowns beneath the ice of a rural Wisconsin lake. The shock of her death dramatically changes the lives of her daughter, troubled sister, and husband. Told in the voices of several of the main characters and skipping back and forth in time, the narrative gradually and tantalizingly reveals the dark family secrets and the unsettling discoveries that lead to the truth of what actually happened...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.8 - AR Pts: 14
Description
When Frances' husband punches her again, she believes he's crossed the line--that the next time he will kill her. She decides to put her life--and that of her son--in the hands of a network which helps women start over. She becomes Beth and begins a new life in Florida with her son. It could be wonderful ... but she lives in fear of being found by Bobbie.
9) East of Eden
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.3 - AR Pts: 34
Description
This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families--the Trasks' and the Hamilton's--whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. The story of two brothers, Aron is a clean-cut model student, engaged to be married, the pride of his hardworking father. Cal is a rebellious loner, sternly rejected...
10) Anna Karenina
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 9.6 - AR Pts: 69
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Formats
Description
A famous legend surrounding the creation of Anna Karenina tells us that Tolstoy began writing a cautionary tale about adultery and ended up by falling in love with his magnificent heroine. It is rare to find a reader of the book who doesn't experience the same kind of emotional upheaval: Anna Karenina is filled with major and minor characters who exist in their own right and fully embody their mid-nineteenth-century Russian milieu, but it still belongs...
Author
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Description
Whatever trials Job suffered were nothing compared to the tribulations that befall Julie Harmon Richards. Following the deaths of her younger brother and father, 17-year-old Julie takes one look at 18-year-old Hank Richards and falls in love. Following their marriage a month later, the two move from their North Carolina homes to Gap Creek, South Carolina, where Hank works at a cotton mill and Julie cooks and cleans for a Mr. Pendergast in exchange...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.2 - AR Pts: 14
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Formats
Description
Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo travels to Johannesburg on an errand for a friend and to visit his son, Absalom, only to learn Absalom has been accused of murdering white city engineer and social activist Arthur Jarvis and stands very little chance of receiving mercy.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.8 - AR Pts: 42
Formats
Description
A boy sees a man commit a murder, then later that day the murderer calls on his mother with flowers. So begins the tense tale of a con man exploiting a love-starved woman, with an alcoholic husband and three children, and a boy who keeps a murder secret to avoid ruining his mother's happiness. The setting is a small town in Vermont, the time the 1960s.
14) Ellen Foster
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.7 - AR Pts: 6
Description
Having suffered abuse and misfortune for much of her life, a young child searches for a better life and finally gets a break in the home of a loving woman with several foster children.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.1 - AR Pts: 31
Formats
Description
Born mute, speaking only in sign, Edgar Sawtelle leads an idyllic life with his parents on their farm in remote northern Wisconsin. For generations, the Sawtelles have raised and trained a fictional breed of dog whose thoughtful companionship is epitomized by Almondine, Edgar's lifelong friend and ally. But with the unexpected return of Claude, Edgar's paternal uncle, turmoil consumes the Sawtelles' once peaceful home. When Edgar's father dies suddenly,...
Author
Series
Fortune's Rocks Quartet volume 3
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.6 - AR Pts: 12
Description
Kathryn Lyon's life was peacefully routine, she had a good job and a happy marriage, so when she received the news that her pilot husband has died in a crash, her world was drastically changed. Even before his body is recovered the media discovers that her husband had a secret life, and Kathryn sets out to learn who her husband really was.
17) Light in August
Author
Formats
Description
Light in August, a novel about hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, features some of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, who is plagued by visions of Confederate horsemen; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.4 - AR Pts: 11
Description
"In his first novel in ten years, Ernest Gaines, the highly acclaimed author of the best-selling The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, brings us a wrenching story of death and identity in a small Cajun Louisiana community in the late 1940s." "A young black named Jefferson is a reluctant party in a shoot-out in a liquor store in which the three other men involved are all killed, including the white store owner. Jefferson, the only survivor, is accused...
20) Paradise
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.8 - AR Pts: 17
Description
Morrison's eagerly awaited new novel--her first since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993--is extraordinary for its breathtaking drive, stylistic panache, and enlivening moral gravitas. Spanning the time from the Reconstruction to the 1970s, this powerful work deftly manipulates past, present, and future as it reveals the interior lives of the citizens of a fictional, all-black town called Paradise.