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To: Parents and students at VHS
(including current 8th graders)
From: Michael Orfe, VHS English Supervisor
Re: Summer Reading
Each year, the teachers at Voorhees and North Hunterdon High Schools get together
and evaluate the summer reading offerings. When you browse through the list, note the requirements
for each grade and level. When you return to school in September, you will be asked to
demonstrate your understanding of what you have read by doing a written reading
assessment designed by your teacher. This is a requirement for all students,
including juniors and seniors who may not have a first semester class.
The Media Center will be open every Tuesday from 12 to 6 pm from July 2 through August 12.
Books on the summer reading list are available there.
Do not put off this assignment until late in the summer!
PROCRASTINATION IS THE THIEF OF TIME!
Happy reading!
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Browse the List by Grade:
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9th Grade - Summer Reading List
Students enrolled in 9th Grade Honors and 9th Grade CP English at Voorhees
are required to read 2 books. All other 9th graders at Voorhees are required to read one book.
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| Books |
Summary |
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Among the Barons (Haddix)
Among the Betrayed (Haddix)
After the Dancing Days (Rostkowski)
Airborn (Oppel)
The Andromeda Strain (Crichton)
The Body of Christopher Creed (Plum-Ucci)
Companions of the Night (Vande Velde)
The Iliad (Homer, Trans. Fagles)
The Lost Years of Merlin (Barron)
The Pearl (Steinbeck)
The Pox Party (Anderson)
The Prince and the Pauper (Twain)
Private Peaceful (Morpurgo)
Something Wicked This Way Comes (Bradbury)
Whale Talk (Chris Crutcher)
View All Summaries
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To read a summary, select a title on the left.
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Haddix, Margaret Peterson.
Among the Barons
In a future world of false identities, government lies, and death threats, Luke feels drawn to the younger brother of the boy whose name Luke has taken.
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Haddix, Margaret Peterson.
Among the Betrayed
Thirteen-year-old Nina is imprisoned by the Population Police, who give her the option of helping them identify illegal "third-born" children, or facing death.
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Rostkowski, Margaret.
After the Dancing Days
A forbidden friendship with a badly disfigured soldier in the aftermath of World War I forces thirteen-year-old
Annie to redefine the word "hero" and to question conventional ideas of patriotism.
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Oppel, Kenneth. Airborn
Matt, a young cabin boy aboard an airship, and Kate, a wealthy young girl traveling with her chaperone, team up to search for the existence of mysterious winged creatures reportedly living hundreds of feet above the Earth's surface.
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Crichton, Michael.
The Andromeda Strain
A deadly microorganism enters Earth's atmosphere with a returning satellite, and a team of medical specialists must discover how to battle it before time runs out.
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Plum-Ucci, Carol. Body of Christopher Creed
Torey Adams, a high school junior with a seemingly perfect life, struggles with doubts and questions surrounding the mysterious disappearance of the class outcast.
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Vande Valde, Vivian.
Companions of the Night
When sixteen-year-old Kerry Nowicki helps a young man escape from a group of men who claim he is a vampire, she faces some bizarre and dangerous choices.
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Homer. The Iliad
The greatest of Greek epics, The Iliad is the story of Achilles' withdrawal from battle and his return to kill the Trojan hero Hector.
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Barron, T.A. The Lost Years of Merlin
Fantasy lovers will relish this first book in Barron's Merlin trilogy. It begins with Merlin washing up on the rocks near death and with no memory. He is cared for by Branwen and called Emrys. He then sets out on a quest to solve the mysteries of his name and where he spent his early years. His quest leads him to magical lands inhabited by magical beings.
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Steinbeck, John. The Pearl
Kino, a poor fisherman, finds a magnificent pearl. After a series of terrible events, and the unfolding of greed and envy around him, Kino must decide what to do with the pearl.
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Andersen, M.T., Pox Party
Various diaries, letters, and other manuscripts chronicle the experiences of Octavian, a young African American, from birth to age sixteen, as he is brought up as part of a science experiment in the years leading up to and during the Revolutionary War.
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Twain, Mark. The Prince and the Pauper
Edward VI of England and a little pauper change places for a few days before Henry VII's death. The prince wanders in rags, while Tom Canty suffers the horrors of princedom.
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Morpurgo, Michael.
Private Peaceful
When Thomas Peaceful’s older brother is forced to join the British Army, Thomas decides to sign up as well, although he is only fourteen years old, to prove himself to his country, his family, his childhood love, Molly, and himself.
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Bradbury, Ray. Something Wicked This Way Comes
Two boys in a small midwestern town are changed forever when a "dark carnival" arrives in the town one autumn evening.
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Crutcher, Chris. Whale Talk
Intellectually and athletically gifted, TJ, a multiracial, adopted teenager, shuns organized sports and the gung-ho athletes at his high school until he agrees to form a swimming team and recruits some of the school's less popular students.
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10th Grade - Summer Reading List
Voorhees 10th grade students must read
The Bean Trees and one other book in the Grade 10 selection.
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| Books |
Summary |
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All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque)
And Then There Were None (Christie)
Armageddon Summer (Yolen & Coville)
The Bean Trees (Kingsolver) Required*
Bless the Beasts and Children (Swarthout)
Circle of Friends (Binchy)
A Cry in the Night (Clark)
The Eyes of the Dragon (King)
The Glass Castle (Walls)
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (McCullers)
How I live Now (Rosoff)
Peeling the Onion (Orr)
Sledding Hill (Crutcher)
View All Summaries
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To read a summary, select a title on the left.
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Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front
Four German youths are pulled abruptly from school to serve at the front as soldiers in World War I. Although the young men of this novel are German, the message is universal in its delineation of the feelings of the common soldier.
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Christie, Agatha. And Then There Were None
This is one of the earliest and the best of this prolific writer's mysteries.
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Yolen, Jane and Bruce Coville. Armageddon Summer
The followers of a religious cult have gathered on a mountaintop to await
the end of the world. Among them are two teenagers who, for different reasons,
have accompanied their parents. Marina and Jed fall in love and must come to terms
with their own beliefs and feelings as they await the end of the world.
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Kingsolver, Barbara. The Bean Trees
Taylor Greer hits the road and inherits a three-year-old Cherokee girl who manages
to slowly wind her way into Taylor's heart.
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Swarthout, Glendon. Bless the Beasts and Children
Six troubled teenagers group together, develop self-esteem, and eventually heal their psychological wounds at an Arizona summer camp that specializes in "turning boys into cowboys."
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Binchy, Maeve. Circle of Friends
Binchy transports readers to the village of Knockglen in Ireland to meet Benny, the only child of doting parents, Eve Malone, an orphan raised by nuns, and a host of local characters.
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Clark, Mary Higgins. A Cry in the Night
In this mystery, Jenny finds that the home of her new husband contains a terrible secret.
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King, Stephen. The Eyes of the Dragon
This story is a horror fantasy featuring dragons, princes, evil wizards, an enchanted castle, and a terrible secret.
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Walls, Jeannette. The Glass Castle
The author recalls her life growing up in a dysfunctional family with an alcohol father and distant mother and describes how she and her siblings had to fend for themselves until they finally found the resources and will to leave home.
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McCullers, Carson. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
John Singer, a deaf-mute, becomes the confidante of four very different people in a small Southern town. Biff Brannon, the owner of a café, Mick Kelly, an adolescent girl, Jake Blout, a radical, and Benedict Copeland, the town's black doctor, all desire to escape from the boredom of the town and find that Singer understands and cares for them.
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Rosoff, Meg. How I live Now
To get away from her pregnant stepmother in New York City, fifteen-year-old Daisy goes to England to stay with her aunt and cousins, with whom she instantly bonds, but soon war breaks out and rips apart the family while devastating the land.
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Orr, Wendy. Peeling the Onion
Anna Duncan has just won a karate championship when her neck is broken in a car accident. Anna must adjust to vast changes in life. Pain, uncertainty, and fear become her companions as she moves toward the future. Loyalty and disloyalty, love and separation, true friendship and fair-weather friendship are all addressed in this complex novel.
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Crutcher, Chris. Sledding Hill
Billy, recently deceased, keeps an eye on his best friend, fourteen-year-old Eddie, and helps him stand up to a conservative minister and English teacher who is orchestrating a censorship challenge.
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11th Grade - Summer Reading List
Students enrolled in 11th Grade AP English Language and Composition must read the required
3 books**. Junior Honors is required
to read The Joy Luck Club and one other book on the 11th grade
selection. All other 11th grade students must read 2 books from the 11th grade selection.
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| Books |
Summary |
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Ender’s Game (Card)
The Fixer (Malamud)
Girl with a Pearl Earring (Chevalier)
The Good Earth (Buck)
**The Handmaid's Tale (Atwood) The Hot Zone (Preston)
Into the Wild (Krakauer)
The Joy Luck Club (Tan)(Required
for Honors)
**A Lesson Before Dying (Gaines)
Little Women (Alcott)
My Sister’s Keeper (Picoult)
**Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass (Douglass)
Notes of a Native Son (Baldwin)
The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway)
Ordinary People (Guest)
Our Town (Wilder)
A Prayer for Owen Meany (Irving)
The Things They Carried (O'Brien)
View All Summaries
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To read a summary, select a title on the left.
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Card, Orson Scott.
Ender’s Game
This exciting science fiction novel introduces Andrew “Ender” Wiggin. He is a genetically bred child who is the hope of the government to save earth from aliens.
They train him by playing military games and he always wins. Now the question is can he win the “game” to save the earth from the aliens?
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Malamud, Bernard.
The
Fixer
Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman, is wrongly accused of murdering a
Christian boy in czarist Russia. |
Chevalier, Tracy.
Girl
with a Pearl Earring
The fictional story of the 16-year-old girl who is the model for
Vermeer’s famous painting. 17th century Delft comes alive with the
details of everyday life in the household of this famous painter.
Problems emerge as Vermeer draws Griet into his world of painting. A
wonderful coming-of-age novel. |
Buck, Pearl S. The
Good Earth
Set in pre-Revolutionary China, The Good Earth won universal acclaim for
its sympathetically authentic picture of Chinese life. Wang Lung and his
wife O-lan rise from peasants to rich landowners through their own
determination and persistence and the "good earth." |
Preston, Richard.
The
Hot Zone
The Hot Zone reads more like a horror novel than the true account it is
of a hot virus that nearly burned through the suburbs of Washington,
D.C. in 1989. |
Krakauer, Jon. Into
the Wild
Tells the story of Chris McCandless, a twenty-four-year-old who walked
into the Alaskan wilderness on an idealistic journey and was found dead
of starvation four months later. Attempts to discover what led the young
man to that point. |
Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck
Club
Chapters in this novel alternate among the lives of four Chinese women
in pre-1949 China and the lives of their American-born daughters in
California. |
Gaines, Ernest J.
A
Lesson Before Dying
In a small Louisiana community in the late 1940s, Jefferson, a retarded
African-American youth, is wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to
die. Wiggins, another African-American, is called upon to forge a bond
with Jefferson to help him die with pride and like a man. |
Alcott, Louisa. Little
Women
Little Women is the story of the March family, whose daughters are
growing up in New England in the mid-1800s. There are numerous sequels. |
Picoult, Jodi. My
Sister’s Keeper
Thirteen-year-old Anna, conceived specifically to provide blood and bone
marrow for her sister Kate who was diagnosed with a rare form of
leukemia at the age of two, decides to sue her parents for control of
her body when her mother wants her to donate a kidney to Kate. |
Douglass, Fredrick. Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is a memoir and treatise on abolition written
by famous orator and ex-slave, Frederick Douglass.
Summary Source: Wikipedia
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Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son
Notes of a Native Son is a non-fiction book by James Baldwin. It was Baldwin's first non-fiction book, and was published in 1955.
Notes of a Native Son collects ten of Baldwin's essays, which had previously appeared in such magazines as Harper's Magazine,
Partisan Review, and The New Leader. The essays mostly tackle issues of race in America and Europe.
Summary Source: Wikipedia
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Hemingway, Ernest.
The Old Man and the Sea
The story chronicles Santiago's fight with a huge marlin and his
struggle to bring it back to his village. |
Guest, Judith.
Ordinary People
The death of one of two sons in an "ordinary" family proves disastrous
to the remaining son and brings the family to crisis and disintegration. |
Wilder, Thornton.
Our
Town
Our Town is a drama of life in a small New Hampshire village called
Grover's Corners. The people of the village go about their lives during
a few years in the early 1900s. |
Irving, John. A
Prayer for Owen Meany
This is a terrifying story of what happens in Owen Meany's life as a
result of hitting
a foul ball that kills his best friend's mother. |
O'Brien, Tim. The
Things They Carried
The Vietnam War is personalized through the brief episodes that make up
this book. The men of Alpha Company battle the enemy and sometimes each
other in this intimate look into the world of the soldier during the
Vietnam War. |
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12th Grade - Summer Reading List
Students must read 2 books. Students enrolled in AP English Literature and Composition must read the required books**.
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| Books |
Summary |
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Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors (Read)
Angela's Ashes (McCourt)
Autobiography of a Face (Grealy)
**The Awakening (Chopin) AP
Black and Blue (Quindlen)
Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Garcia Marquez)
Cold Mountain (Charles Frazier)
**A Doll's House (Ibsen) AP
The Fifth Child (Lessing)
The Fountainhead (Rand)
Grendel (Gardner)
**The Handmaid's Tale (Atwood) Hiroshima (Hersey)
Inexcusable (Lynch)
Jane Eyre (Bronte)
Light in August (Faulkner)
People's Choice (Greenfield)
Poisonwood Bible (Kingsolver)
Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston)
A Thief of Time (Hillerman)
Watership Down (Adams)
Wuthering Heights (Bronte)
View All Summaries
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To read a summary, select a title on the left.
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Read, Piers Paul.
Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors
One of the greatest survival stories of all time, Alive relates the
experiences of the survivors of a plane that crashed in the Andes
Mountains. |
McCourt, Frank.
Angela's Ashes
Frank McCourt's memoirs of growing up in the slums of Limerick, Ireland,
earned him the Pulitzer Prize. He recalls his alcoholic father, the loss
of his siblings, the power of the Irish Catholic Church, and the shame
of poverty in this engaging story. |
Grealy, Lucy,
Autobiography of a Face
A memoir in which award-winning poet Lucy Grealy recalls her experiences
with a potentially terminal cancer that required she have a third of her
jaw removed when she was nine years old, and discusses the suffering she
endured as she was growing up from classmates, strangers, and other
people because of her looks. |
Chopin, Kate. The
Awakening
Tells of a woman's desire for an affair with the son of a Louisiana
resort owner whom she meets on vacation. |
Quindlen, Anna. Black
and Blue
Black and Blue is a suspenseful novel about Fran Benedetto's abusive
relationship with her husband, Bobby, a New York City policeman. After
her passionate marriage turns into a nightmare, Fran runs away to
Florida with her ten-year-old son and starts a new life under a new
name, living in fear yet with increasing hope that Bobby will not track
her down. |
Garcia Marquez,
Gabriel. Chronicle of a Death Foretold
An isolated Latin American town is the setting for this dark thriller,
which features a spectacular wedding, a sudden scandal,
and a murder to which the entire town appears to be an accessory before
the fact. |
Frazier, Charles.
Cold
Mountain
Inman, a wounded Confederate soldier, leaves the hospital where he is
being treated and determines to walk home. The story of Ada, his
sweetheart, is intertwined with Inaman’s. Based on the story of the
author’s great-great grandfather who deserted during the Civil War. |
Ibsen, Henrik. A
Doll's House
In this three-act psychological drama, Nora Helmer is pampered by her
complacent husband, Torvald, who treats her like a scatterbrained child.
Unknown to him, she borrows money to finance a trip necessary for her
husband's health, and when he finds out, his convention-bound reaction
has surprising repercussions. |
Lessing, Doris. The
Fifth Child
Ben, the fifth child of Harriet and David Lovett, puts an end to the
idealistic homelife and harmony of the Lovett household. This child,
from before birth until his teenage years, is not normal by any societal
standards. |
Rand, Ayn. The
Fountainhead
The novel is a brilliant story of society's attempt to stifle the
creativity of one person. |
Gardner, John.
Grendel
Grendel retells the Beowulf legend from the monster's point of view. |
Hersey, John.
Hiroshima
Hiroshima is the story of six ordinary people - a clerk, a physician, a
minister, a widowed seamstress, a young surgeon, and a German priest -
starting at 8:15, when the first atom bomb was dropped. The author
follows the course of their lives after the bomb was dropped, hour by
hour and then day by day. |
Lynch, Chris.
Inexcusable
High school senior and football player Keir sets out to enjoy himself on
graduation night, but when he attempts to comfort a friend whose date
has left her stranded, things go terribly wrong. |
Bronte, Charlotte.
Jane Eyre
Jane Eyre, a timid orphan who was mistreated at her uncle's home, is
sent to a boarding school, where she stays on to become a teacher. Tired
of teaching, Jane takes a position as governess for Adele Varens, a ward
of Edward Rochester. Jane eventually falls in love with Rochester and
does not learn of his insane wife until the day she is to be married. |
Faulkner, William.
Light In August
Race, religion, and the southern community are dominating themes of this
compelling novel from the 1930s. The central character, Joe Christmas,
is an orphan with mixed bloodlines, antisocial tendencies, and a harsh
personal history. |
Greenfield, Jeff.
People's Choice
When the newly elected president falls off a horse and dies of an
embolism, it is assumed that the vice-president elect will take his job
until one of the electors begins an insurrection and constitutional
chaos breaks out. This is a humorous, cautionary tale. |
The Poisonwood Bible
Nathan Price and his family move to the Belgian Congo in 1959. This
novel presents the experiences they have while living in Africa and how
they affect each member of the family in a different way. |
Hurston, Zora Neale.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Janie Crawford, a woman living in the black town of Eton, Florida during
the 1930s, is independent and articulate. Married three times and accused
and tried for the murder of one of her husbands, she continues to search for her
real identity. |
Hillerman, Tony.
A
Thief of Time
Chilling discoveries unearthed at a dig for Navajo pottery bring Lt. Joe
Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee to the site and put them on the trail of
stolen artifacts, a missing woman, and bizarre and mystifying murders. |
Adams, Richard.
Watership Down
Faced with the annihilation of its warren, a small group of rabbits sets
out across the English downs in search of a new home. |
Bronte, Emily.
Wuthering Heights
Mr. Lockwood, forced to spend a stormy night at Wuthering Heights,
encounters the spirit of Catherine. Heathcliff, an unsociable man who
was taken off the streets by Catherine's father and who fell in love
with Catherine, continues to work his revenge against all those who had
injured him before his inheritance. |
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