This document provides summaries of books recommended for summer reading for students entering English 4 and AP English. It includes 3 sentence summaries of 20 books sorted into categories such as teen issues, sports, adventure, fantasy/other worlds, science & technology, romance, historical fiction, mystery/suspense/thrillers, friendships, and cultural & social issues. The books cover a wide range of genres and topics to appeal to different interests.

1. For students entering English 4 and AP
English
Summer Reading Titles

2. Teen Issues

3. Wintergirls
by Laurie Halse Anderson
 Lia and Cassie had been best
friends since elementary school,
and each developed her own
style of eating disorder that
leads to disaster. Now 18, they
are no longer friends. Despite
their estrangement, Cassie calls
Lia 33 times on the night of her
death, and Lia never answers.
As events play out, Lia's guilt,
her need to be thin, and her fight
for acceptance unravel in an
almost poetic stream of
consciousness in this startlingly
crisp and pitch-perfect first-
person narrative.

4. Fat Kid Rules the World
by K.L. Going
 His name is Troy, but to the world--
and in his internal dialogues--he is
the Fat Kid. Really Fat. Almost 300
pounds of sweating, unhappy
insecurity. Then out of a moment
of despair comes magic. As Troy
considers whether to splatter
himself on a subway track, Curt
MacCrae, a charismatic punk
rocker/homeless kid/dropout,
comes along and stops him. For
the price of a meal, Curt befriends
Troy, and he sees something
under all those layers: a potential
musician, a friend, and someone
with the ability to see through life's
bull.

5. Sports

6. Inexcusable
by Chris Lynch
 Keir would never do anything to hurt
anyone intentionally–or would he?
When he tackles and cripples a
member of an opposing football
team, it's determined to be an
accident–one that earns him the
good-humored nickname, Killer.
When he and his buddies destroy a
town statue, they consider it a high-
spirited, funny prank. When he gets
drunk, the alcohol abuse is
dismissed as silly, harmless drinks,
and drugs at parties are strictly
recreational. And when he date
rapes the girl he thinks he loves, at
first he convinces himself that the
way it looks is not the way it is.

7. Eleven Seconds
by E. M. Swift and Travis Roy
 On an October night in
1995, Roy, a talented
young hockey player,
skated onto the ice for
his varsity debut with
Boston University.
Eleven fateful seconds
later, he was paralyzed
from the neck down.

8. Adventure

9. Unbroken
by Laura Hillenbrand
 On a May afternoon in 1943,
an Army Air Forces bomber
crashed into the Pacific
Ocean and disappeared,
leaving only a spray of debris
and a slick of oil, gasoline,
and blood. Then, on the
ocean surface, a face
appeared. It was that of a
young lieutenant, the plane’s
bombardier, who was
struggling to a life raft and
pulling himself aboard. So
began one of the most
extraordinary odysseys of the
Second World War.

10. Galapagos
by Kurt Vonnegut
 Leon Trout, the ghost of
a decapitated
shipbuilder, narrates the
humorous, ironic and
sometimes carping
decline of the human
race, as seen through
the eyes and minds of
the survivors of a
doomed cruise to the
Galapagos Islands.

11. Fantasy/Other Worlds

12. Graceling
by Kristin Cashore
 Katsa, a warrior-girl in her late teens
has one blue eye and one green
eye. This gives her haunting beauty,
but also marks her as a Graceling.
Gracelings are beings with special
talents—swimming, storytelling,
dancing. Katsa's Grace is considered
more useful: her ability to fight (and
kill, if she wanted to) is unequaled in
the seven kingdoms. Forced to act
as a henchman for a manipulative
king, Katsa channels her guilt by
forming a secret council of like-
minded citizens who carry out secret
missions to promote justice over
cruelty and abuses of power.

13. Power of Six
by Pittacus Lore
 The story is told by various members of
the Garde: Number Four (John Smith),
who is on the run with Sam, Six, and
Bernie Kosar (aka Hadley, a Lorien
Chimæra), and Number Seven (Marina),
who's hiding at Santa Teresa, a convent
in Spain. While John, Number Six and
Sam try to stay ahead of the
Mogadorians while searching for the
other surviving Loric, Number Seven
searches for news of John after his
heroic battle at the school that came at
the end of I Am Number Four.

14. Science & Technology

15. Unwind
by Neal Shusterman
 Set in the future, the second civil
war is fought over abortion. To end
the war, a compromise is reached
that ends the practice of abortion
but creates an alternative called
"unwinding." Between the ages of
13 and 17, parents or guardians
can choose to have their children
unwound, which involves having
every part of their bodies
harvested to be "donated" to
another person so, technically,
they don't really die. The complex
and compelling plot follows three
teens whose stories intertwine
when they escape while on their
way to the harvest camps.

16. Romance

17. Along for the Ride
by Sarah Dessen
 Auden is about to start college in
the fall, and decides to escape her
control-freak professor mom to
spend the summer with her
novelist father, his new young wife,
and their brand-new baby
daughter, Thisbe. Over the course
of the summer, Auden tackles
many new projects: learning to
ride a bike, making real
connections with peers, facing the
emotional fallout of her parents’
divorce, distancing herself from
her mother, and falling in love with
Eli, a fellow insomniac bicyclist
recovering from his own traumas.

18. The Last Summer of You and Me by
Ann Brashares
 Riley and Alice, two sisters now
in their twenties, and as fiercely
different as they are loyal, have
spent every summer at their
parents’ modest beach house on
New York’s Fire Island. Each
year, they return to the house
and community they have known
since they were children—and to
Paul, the boy next door. But this
summer marks a season of
change: budding love and sexual
interest, an illness, and a deep
secret force all three to confront
the increasing complexities of
their lives and friendships.

19. Historical Fiction

20. Leviathan
by Scott Westerfeld
 This is World War I as never
seen before. The story begins
the same: on June 28, 1914,
Archduke Franz Ferdinand
and his wife are
assassinated, triggering a
sequence of alliances that
plunges the world into war.
But that is where the
similarity ends. This global
conflict is between the
Clankers, who put their faith
in machines, and the
Darwinists, whose technology
is based on the development
of new species.

21. Mystery/Suspense/Thrillers

22. Shift
by Jennifer Bradbury
 Best friends Chris and Win head
out on a West Virginia to
Washington State bicycle
adventure after high school
graduation, at the end of which
Win disappears. Alternating
chapters flash back to details of
the trip, then forward to a private
investigation instigated by Win's
powerful father to uncover why his
son told lies to Chris about an
uncle in Seattle who doesn't exist,
among other things. Little by little,
Win's rich, domineering, and
neglectful parents come more into
focus, and it becomes evident that
the teen needed to escape their
iron rule.

23. Wish You Well
by David Baldacci
 The year is 1940. After a car
accident kills 12-year-old Lou's
and 7-year-old Oz's father and
leaves their mother Amanda in a
catatonic trance, the children
find themselves sent from New
York City to their great-
grandmother Louisa's farm in
Virginia. Louisa's hardscrabble
existence comes as a profound
shock to precocious Lou and her
shy brother. Still struggling to
absorb their abandonment, they
enter gamely into a life that tests
them at every turn--and offers
unimaginable rewards.

24. The Spellman Files
by Lisa Lutz
 In a family of private
investigators, privacy is
nonexistent. The Spellman
parents spy on the kids
just as much as the kids
spy on the parents. But
after 28 years of this,
middle child Isabelle wants
out of the family business.
Her parents agree, but
only if she solves the 10-
year-old cold case of a
missing teenager.

25. Friendships

26. The Thirteenth Tale
by Diane Setterfield
 Vida Winter, England's most
famous and reclusive writer,
is nearing the end, and
before she goes she wants
her amazing life story to be
recorded for posterity. For
this, she engages a lonely
young biographer, Margaret
Lea, who has a few secrets
of her own. When these two
forceful women meet, the
stage is set for an ever-
mounting series of shocking
surprises.

27. Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by
Gabrielle Zevin
 After high-school junior
Naomi conks her head,
she can't remember
anything that happened
since sixth grade. She is
by turns mystified and
startled by evidence of
her present life, from the
birth-control pills in her
bedside table to her
parents' astonishing,
rancorous split.

28. The Spectacular Now
by Tim Tharp
 Unlike most high school
seniors, Sutter Keely is not
concerned with the future.
He’s the life of the party,
and he’s interested in the
Spectacular Now. In
stream of consciousness–
style prose, Sutter
describes his lurching from
one good time to the next:
he carries whiskey in a
flask, and once its mixed
into his 7Up, anything is
possible.

29. Guy Stuff

30. I am the Messenger
by Marcus Zusak
 Nineteen-year-old cabbie Ed
Kennedy has little in life to be
proud of: his dad died of
alcoholism, and he and his mom
have few prospects for success.
He has little to do except share a
run-down apartment with his
faithful yet smelly dog, drive his
taxi, and play cards and drink
with his amiable yet similarly
washed-up friends. Then, after
he stops a bank robbery, Ed
begins receiving anonymous
messages marked in code on
playing cards in the mail, and
almost immediately his life
begins to swerve off its beaten-
down path.

31. Anansi Boys
by Neil Gaiman
 When Charlie learns of the death
of his estranged father in Florida,
he attends the funeral and learns
two facts that turn his well-
ordered existence upside-down:
that his father was a human form
of Anansi, the African trickster
god, and that he has a brother,
Spider, who has inherited some
of their father's godlike abilities.
Spider comes to visit Charlie and
gets him fired from his job, steals
his fiancée, and is instrumental
in having him arrested for
embezzlement and suspected of
murder.

32. Cultural & Social Issues

33. The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story by
Diane Ackerman
 This novel tells the
remarkable WWII story of Jan
Zabinski, the director of the
Warsaw Zoo, and his wife,
Antonina, who, with courage
and coolheaded ingenuity,
sheltered 300 Jews as well
as Polish resisters in their
villa and in animal cages and
sheds.

34. No Choirboy: Murder, Violence, and
Teenagers on Death Row by Susan
Kuklin
 Kuklin tells five stories here;
four are about young men
who committed murder
before they reached the age
of 18, and one is the story of
a victim's family. Each
narrative presents a picture
of a troubled youth who did
something he later regretted,
but something that could not
be undone.

35. Prom
by Laurie Halse Anderson
 When the math teacher
disappears with the funds
just eleven days before the
dance, determined and
organized Nat goes into high
gear to find alternative ways
to make the prom happen
and drags an unwilling
Ashley into the flurry of
urgent details.