BOOKS FOR SUMMER READING

2008

Transitions List

Bread and Roses, Too by Katherine Paterson (J)  
            Jake and Rosa, two children living in Lawrence, Massachusetts, are sent to Vermont for safety while the women of the textile industry strike during the 1912 Bread and Roses strike of mill workers.
 
Annie’s Promise by Sonia Levitin (YA)
            Twelve-year-old Annie Platt is able to spend the summer of 1945 at Quaker Pines camp for young people and learns some independence from her family.  This follows Journey To America and Silver Days.

Inkheart by Cornelia Funke (J)
            Twelve-year-old Meggie learns that her father can bring characters in a book to life when she and her father are abducted by one of his creations. (Sequel is Inkspell).

Surviving the Applewhites by Stephanie Tolan (YA)
            Juvenile delinquent Jake Semple is sent to live with the artistic and eccentric members of the Applewhite family.  A local production of the Sound of Music brings the family together as well as brings out talents that Jake didn’t know he had.

Red Moon At Sharpsburg  by Rosemary Wells (YA)
            When the Civil War breaks out in the year 1861, India, a young Southern, struggles to survive the war that threatens to destroy her family and hopes to use her sharp intelligence to further her education.
 
Fairest by Gail Carson Levine (YA)
             Queen Ivi of Ayortha who cannot sing, forces Aza, a commoner, to sing for her because singing and beauty are prized above all else in the Kingdom.

 Behind the Curtain by Peter Abrahams (YA)
            The sequel to Down the Rabbit Hole in which eighth grader Ingrid Levin-Hill, an avid Sherlock Holmes fan, learns that mysterious things are happening in her town and she is kidnapped while investigating them.
 
Ashes of Roses by Mary Jane Auch (YA)
            Sixteen-year-old Rose Nolan is determined to make it in America after part of her family is sent back to Ireland but the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 brings tragedy.

The Linden Tree by Ellie Mathews (J)
            In 1948, nine-year-old Katy Sue’s mother dies from meningitis, and her Aunt Katherine quits her teaching job to help out on their Iowa farm. 

Hoot by Carl Hiaasen (YA)
            Roy, who is new to Florida, becomes involved in another boy’s attempt to save a colony of burrowing owls from a proposed site of a pancake restaurant.

The Safe-Keeper’s Secret by Sharon Shinn  (YA)
            Damiana the safe-keeper is told the secret behind a foundling, and she brings up the child along with her own child, a daughter.  As the years pass, the two children have to come to terms with who they are and who they might be in the future
           
Red Glass by Laura Resau (YA)
            Sixteen-year-old Sophie and her family hope to adopt six-year-old Pablo whose parents did not survive the border cross into Arizona from Mexico.  Sophie travels through Mexico with Pablo to the area where he was born and to Guatemala where her would-be boyfriend hopes to find his mother. 

Fire In the Hills by Donna Jo Napoli (YA)
Fourteen-year-old Roberto, after having escaped from a Nazi labor camp, becomes a member of the resistance fighting against the Nazi occupiers in Italy.  This is the sequel to Stones In Water.

Chu Ju’s House by Gloria Whelan (J)
            Fourteen-year-old Chu Ju knows that the law of China states that a family may have only two children and that tradition dictates that every family should have a boy.  When a baby girl is born to her family instead of a a boy she leaves her rural home in China to save her baby sister from being sent away.
 
The Wednesday Wars by Gary Schmidt (YA)
            During the 1967 school year, when all of his classmates go to religion school, seventh-grader Holling Hoodhood stays in his classroom where he and his teacher read plays of William Shakespeare and Holling learns about the world that he lives in. 

Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy
by Gary Schmidt (YA)
            In Maine in 1911, Turner Buckminster, the son of a minister, meets Lizzie Bright Griffen, an African American girl from a poor nearby island community founded by former slaves. The town fathers want to change the community into a tourist spot.

Flush by Carl Hiaasen (YA)
            Because their father is jailed for sinking a river boat, Noah and Abbey Underwood have to gather evidence that the owner of the floating casino is emptying his bilge tanks into the waters of the Florida Keys.
 

The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall (J)
            Four lovable sisters, ages four through twelve, vacation with their widowed father at an estate in the Berkshire Mountains and have many adventures with the son of the estate’s owner.

The House of Djinn by Suzanne Fisher Staples   (YA)
            Shabanu has been in hiding for ten years.  It is time for her to return to find her daughter, Mumtaz.  This sequel to Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind takes place in contemporary Pakistan. 

My Last Skirt by Linda Durrant(YA)
            After having emigrated to the United States from Ireland, Jennie Hodgers dresses as a boy so that she can serve in the 95th Illinois Infantry as Private Albert Cashier, a Union soldier in the American Civil War.

Esperanza Rising by Pam Munoz Ryan (J)
            Esperanza and her mother are forced to leave the life of wealth and privilege of Mexican high society and go to work in the labor camps of Southern California.

Habibi by Naomi Shihab Nye (YA)
            Fourteen-year-old Liyana Abboud and her Arabic family move to Jerusalem from the United States and find out first hand the tensions between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Things Hoped For by Andrew Clements (YA)
Seventeen-year-old Gwen, living with her grandfather in Manhattan while she attends music school, practices for her music audition, tries to find out what happened to her grandfather,  and meets Robert, another musician, who seems to be having a strange man following him. This is a follow-up to the book Things Not Seen.

 Under the Persimmon Tree by Suzanne F. Staples (YA)
            The lives of Najmah, a young Afghan girl, and Nusrat, an American-Muslim teacher waiting for her Afghan doctor husband to return from a clinic, intersect during the Afghanistan and Pakistan War in 2001 – 2002.

The Transall Saga by Gary Paulsen (YA)
            While thirteen-year-old Mark is backpacking in the desert, he falls into a tube of light and is transported to a primitive world where it is necessary to use his knowledge and skills.

The Wreckers by Iain Lawrence (YA)
            Fourteen-year-old John Spencer is shipwrecked after a vicious storm and he has to try to save himself and his father while dealing with an evil secret about the English coastal town where they are stranded. 

Eye of the Crow by Shane Peacock (YA)
            After a young woman is found stabbed to death in London, a young boy is drawn to the scene to investigate the murder.  He becomes a suspect himself. 

Flipped by Wendelin VanDraanen (YA)
            Two teenagers describe how their feelings about each other and their families have changed over the years.

Snow Falling In Spring by Moying Li (YA 951.05092)
            Young Moying Li is twelve years old when the Cultural Revolution begins in China.  Her secure world changes for her as well as for her family in this book about  her life.