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= **SCITUATE HIGH SCHOOL** = = **SUMMER READING BOOK GROUPS 2013!** =

|| "Perfect for fans of //Thirteen Reasons Why // and //Looking for Alaska //, Jennifer Weiner, #1 //New York Times //bestselling author, calls Elizabeth LaBan’s The Tragedy Paper “a beguiling and beautifully written tale of first love and heartbreak.”
 * ==Book Title/Author== || ==Summary== ||
 * ==//The Tragedy Paper// by Elizabeth Laban (2013)==

It follows the story of Tim Macbeth, a seventeen-year-old albino and a recent transfer to the prestigious Irving School, where the motto is “Enter here to be and find a friend.” A friend is the last thing Tim expects or wants—he just hopes to get through his senior year unnoticed. Yet, despite his efforts to blend into the background, he finds himself falling for the quintessential “It” girl, Vanessa Sheller, girlfriend of Irving’s most popular boy. To Tim's surprise, Vanessa is into him, too, but she can kiss her social status goodbye if anyone ever finds out. Tim and Vanessa begin a clandestine romance, but looming over them is the Tragedy Paper, Irving’s version of a senior year thesis, assigned by the school’s least forgiving teacher.

Jumping between viewpoints of the love-struck Tim and Duncan, a current senior about to uncover the truth of Tim and Vanessa, //The Tragedy Paper // is a compelling tale of forbidden love and the lengths people will go to keep their secrets." -From Amazon.com

**This book is perfect for** freshmen and sophomores who enjoy tales about popularity and individuality in high school, being yourself, boarding school, and (of course) tragedy. || || From the streets of Stockton to the beaches of Venice, all the way down to the Mexican border, //We Were Here//  follows a journey of self-discovery by a boy who is trying to forgive himself in an unforgiving world.  When it happened, Miguel was sent to Juvi. The judge gave him a year in a group home and required him to write in a journal so that some counselor could try to figure out how he thinks. The judge had no idea that he actually did Miguel a favor. Ever since it happened, his mom can’t even look at him in the face. //Any// home besides his would be a better place to live.
 * ==**//We Were Here// by Matt De La Pena (2009)**==

<span style="font-family: Cambria,serif; font-size: 12pt;">But Miguel didn’t bet on meeting Dondell or Mong or any of what happened after they escaped from Juvi. He only thought about Mexico and getting to the border where he could start over. Forget his mom. Forget his brother. Forget himself. <span style="font-family: Cambria,serif; font-size: 12pt;">Life doesn’t usually work out how you think it will, though. And most of the time, running away is the quickest path right back to what you’re running from.

<span style="font-family: Cambria,serif; font-size: 12pt;">**This book is perfect for** freshmen and sophomores who crave a summer read with action, suspense, humor, and relatable characters. || || <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">When a white servant girl violates the order of plantation society, she unleashes a tragedy that exposes the worst and best in the people she has come to call her family. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Orphaned while onboard ship from Ireland, seven-year-old Lavinia arrives on the steps of a tobacco plantation where she is to live and work with the slaves of the kitchen house. Under the care of Belle, the master's illegitimate daughter, Lavinia becomes deeply bonded to her adopted family, though she is set apart from them by her white skin. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Eventually, Lavinia is accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. Lavinia finds herself perilously straddling two very different worlds. When she is forced to make a choice, loyalties are brought into question, dangerous truths are laid bare, and lives are put at risk. //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Kitchen House //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> is a tragic story of page-turning suspense, exploring the meaning of family, where love and loyalty prevail. (amazon.com) || || //<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Breaking Night //<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;"> is the stunning memoir of a young woman who at age fifteen was living on the streets, and who eventually made it into Harvard.
 * ==//The Kitchen House// by Kathleen Grissom (2010)==
 * ==//Breaking Night// by Liz Murray (2011)==

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Liz Murray was born to loving but drug-addicted parents in the Bronx. In school she was taunted for her dirty clothing and lice-infested hair, eventually skipping so many classes that she was put into a girls’ home. At age fifteen, Liz found herself on the streets when her family finally unraveled. She learned to scrape by, foraging for food and riding subways all night to have a warm place to sleep.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">When Liz’s mother died of AIDS, she decided to take control of her own destiny and go back to high school, often completing her assignments in the hallways and subway stations where she slept. Liz squeezed four years of high school into two, while homeless; won a //<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">New York Times //<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;"> scholarship; and made it into the Ivy League. //<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Breaking Night //<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;"> is an unforgettable and beautifully written story of one young woman’s indomitable spirit to survive and prevail, against all odds. (Amazon.com) || || <span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Kathy Reichs, creator of the hit television show and mystery series, //Bones// brings her bestselling blend of science and suspense to teens with the first in a new series, //__Virals__ (co-authored with her son Brendan Reichs)//. Tory is the science-obsessed niece of a famous forensic anthropologist, Temperance Brennan (star of the //Bones// program and novels), living on a remote island off the coast of South Carolina. An old military ID tag leads Tory and her best friends, Ben, Hi, and Shelton--all self proclaimed “sci-philes”--to an illegal research lab, where they are exposed to a mutant strain of canine parvovirus. When the teens begin experiencing preternatural physical changes, their search for answers brings them in contact with cold-blooded killers. Reichs’s characters are realistically drawn modern teenagers, and the state-of-the-art forensic details give this thriller an added edge. || || <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">A travelogue by Bill Bryson is as close to a sure thing as funny books get. //<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">The Lost Continent //<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;"> is no exception. Following an urge to rediscover his youth (he should know better), the author leaves his native Des Moines, Iowa, in a journey that takes him across 38 states. Lucky for us, he brought a notebook. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">With a razor wit and a kind heart, Bryson serves up a colorful tale of boredom, kitsch, and beauty when you least expect it. Gentler elements aside, //The Lost Continent// is an amusing book. Here's Bryson on the women of his native state: "I will say this, however--and it's a strange, strange thing--the teenaged daughters of these fat women are always utterly delectable ... I don't know what it is that happens to them, but it must be awful to marry one of those nubile cuties knowing that there is a time bomb ticking away in her that will at some unknown date make her bloat out into something huge and grotesque, presumably all of a sudden and without much notice, like a self-inflating raft from which the pin has been yanked." <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Yes, Bill, but be honest: what do you really think? (Amazon.com) || || <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">A young woman walks into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally changed.
 * ==//Virals// by Kathy Reichs (2011)==
 * ==//The Lost Continent// by Bill Bryson (2001)==
 * ==//The Power of Habit// by Charles Duhigg (2012)==

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Marketers at Procter & Gamble study videos of people making their beds. They are desperately trying to figure out how to sell a new product called Febreze, on track to be one of the biggest flops in company history. Suddenly, one of them detects a nearly imperceptible pattern—and with a slight shift in advertising, Febreze goes on to earn a billion dollars a year.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">An untested CEO takes over one of the largest companies in America. His first order of business is attacking a single pattern among his employees—how they approach worker safety—and soon the firm, Alcoa, becomes the top performer in the Dow Jones.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">What do all these people have in common? They achieved success by focusing on the patterns that shape every aspect of our lives. (Amazon.com) || || <span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">In //<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The Age of Miracles //, the world is ending not with a bang so much as a long, drawn-out whimper. And it turns out the whimper can be a lot harder to cope with. The Earth's rotation slows, gradually stretching out days and nights and subtly affecting the planet's gravity. The looming apocalypse parallels the adolescent struggles of 10-year-old Julia, as her comfortable suburban life succumbs to a sort of domestic deterioration. Julia confronts her parents' faltering marriage, illness, the death of a loved one, her first love, and her first heartbreak. Karen Thompson Walker is a gifted storyteller. Her language is precise and poetic, but style never overpowers the realism she imbues to her characters and the slowing Earth they inhabit. Most impressively, Thompson Walker has written a coming-of-age tale that asks whether it's worth coming of age at all in a world that might end at any minute. Like the best stories about the end of the world, //<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The Age of Miracles // is about the existence of hope and whether it can prevail in the face of uncertainty. || || ===<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">By all appearances, Lizzie Simon was perfect. She had an Ivy League education, lots of friends, a loving family, and a dazzling career as a theater producer by the age of twenty-three. But that wasn't enough: Lizzie still felt alone in the world, and largely misunderstood. Having been diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a teenager, she longed to meet others like herself; she wanted to hear the experiences of those who managed to move past their mental illness to live typical lives. So Lizzie hits the road, hoping to find "a herd of her own." Along the way she finds romance and madness, survivors and sufferers, and, somewhere between the lanes, herself. //Detour// is a fast-paced, enduring memoir that demystifies mental illness while it embraces the universally human struggle to become whole. This book includes some strong language. Recommended for juniors and seniors. === || || <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">Two kids named Wes Moore were born blocks apart within a year of each other. Both grew up fatherless in similar Baltimore neighborhoods and had difficult childhoods; both hung out on street corners with their crews; both ran into trouble with the police. How, then, did one grow up to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader, while the other ended up a convicted murderer serving a life sentence? Wes Moore, the author of this fascinating book, sets out to answer this profound question. In alternating narratives that take readers from heart-wrenching losses to moments of surprising redemption, //<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">The Other Wes Moore //<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;"> tells the story of a generation of boys trying to find their way in a hostile world. (Amazon.com) || || <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">For the first time anywhere, the first-person account of the planning and execution of the Bin Laden raid from a Navy Seal who confronted the terrorist mastermind and witnessed his final moments. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">From the streets of Iraq to the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips in the Indian Ocean, and from the mountaintops of Afghanistan to the third floor of Osama Bin Laden’s compound, operator Mark Owen of the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group--commonly known as SEAL Team Six-- has been a part of some of the most memorable special operations in history, as well as countless missions that never made headlines. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">//No Easy Day// puts readers alongside Owen and the other handpicked members of the twenty-four-man team as they train for the biggest mission of their lives. The blow-by-blow narrative of the assault, beginning with the helicopter crash that could have ended Owen’s life straight through to the radio call confirming Bin Laden’s death, is an essential piece of modern history. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">In //No Easy Day//, Owen also takes readers onto the field of battle in America’s ongoing War on Terror and details the selection and training process for one of the most elite units in the military. Owen’s story draws on his youth in Alaska and describes the SEALs’ quest to challenge themselves at the highest levels of physical and mental endurance. With boots-on-the-ground detail, Owen describes numerous previously unreported missions that illustrate the life and work of a SEAL and the evolution of the team after the events of September 11. In telling the true story of the SEALs whose talents, skills, experiences, and exceptional sacrifices led to one of the greatest victories in the War on Terror, Mark Owen honors the men who risk everything for our country, and he leaves readers with a deep understanding of the warriors who keep America safe. (Amazon.com) || || <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">From 2004 to 2011, Terry Francona managed the Boston Red Sox, perhaps the most scrutinized team in all of sports. During that time, every home game was a sellout. Every play, call, word, gesture—on the field and off—was analyzed by thousands. And every decision was either genius, or disastrous. In those eight years, the Red Sox were transformed from a cursed franchise to one of the most successful and profitable in baseball history—only to fall back to last place as soon as Francona was gone. Now, in //<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Francona: The Red Sox Years //<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">, the decorated manager opens up for the first time about his tenure in Boston, unspooling the narrative of how this world-class organization reached such incredible highs and dipped to equally incredible lows. But through it all, there was always baseball, that beautiful game of which Francona never lost sight. (Amazon.com) || || The author, Tom Donahue, is a resident of Scituate. He has worked for years in the Massachusetts prison system. //Fraternal Brothers// has been reviewed well by murder mystery fans who love page-turners. References to Boston and Massachusetts give the thrills of this book a local flavor. Readers, even the tough critics, love the suspense, the believability of the characters and the ending they never saw coming. Readers compare Tom’s work to some of the better murder mystery writers yet without the gratuitous violence. If you like puzzles and suspense and you choose this read, you can talk to Tom on book day in the fall. He would love to visit SHS and be part of the discussion. We get to talk to the mythmaker himself. We get to hear the writer’s story. He is very much looking forward to visiting. || || <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be completely rewritten.
 * ==//The Age of Miracles// by Karen Thompson Walker (2013)==
 * ==//Detour: My Bipolar Road Trip in 4d// by Lizzie Simon (2003)==
 * ==//The Other Wes Moore// by Wes Moore (2011)==
 * ==No Easy Day by Mark Owen (2012)==
 * ==//Francona: The Red Sox Years// by Terry Francona and Dan Shaughnessy (2013)==
 * ==//Fraternal Bonds// by Thomas Donahue (2012)==
 * ==//The Fault in Our Stars// by John Green (2012)==

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Insightful, bold, irreverent, and raw, The Fault in Our Stars is award-winning-author John Green’s most ambitious and heartbreaking work yet, brilliantly exploring the funny, thrilling, and tragic business of being alive and in love. (Amazon.com) || || <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">When Rosalind Wiseman first published //<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Queen Bees & Wannabes //<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">, she fundamentally changed the way adults look at girls’ friendships and conflicts–from how they choose their best friends, how they express their anger, their boundaries with boys, and their relationships with parents. Wiseman showed how girls of every background are profoundly influenced by their interactions with one another.
 * ==//Queen Bees and Wannabees// by Rosalind Wiseman (2009)==

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Now, Wiseman has revised and updated her groundbreaking book for a new generation of girls and explores:

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">•How girls’ experiences before adolescence impact their teen years, future relationships, and overall success <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">•The different roles girls play in and outside of cliques as Queen Bees, Targets, and Bystanders, and how this defines how they and others are treated <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">•Girls’ power plays–from fake apologies to fights over IM and text messages <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">•Where boys fit into the equation of girl conflicts and how you can help your daughter better hold her own with the opposite sex <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">•Checking your baggage–recognizing how your experiences impact the way you parent, and how to be sanely involved in your daughter’s difficult, yet common social conflicts

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Packed with insights about technology’s impact on Girl World and enlivened with the experiences of girls, boys, and parents, the book that inspired the hit movie //<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Mean Girls //<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">offers concrete strategies to help you empower your daughter to be socially competent and treat herself with dignity. (Amazon) || || <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">A moving and haunting novel for readers of //<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">The Book Thief //
 * ==//Between Shades of Gray// by Ruta Sepetys (2012)==

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Fifteen-year-old Lina is a Lithuanian girl living an ordinary life--until Soviet officers invade her home and tear her family apart. Separated from her father and forced onto a crowded train, Lina, her mother, and her young brother make their way to a Siberian work camp, where they are forced to fight for their lives. Lina finds solace in her art, documenting these events by drawing. Risking everything, she imbeds clues in her drawings of their location and secretly passes them along, hoping her drawings will make their way to her father's prison camp. But will strength, love, and hope be enough for Lina and her family to survive? (Amazon) || || <span style="font-family: Tahoma,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">In this remarkable account of the April 20, 1999, Columbine High School shooting, journalist Cullen not only dispels several of the prevailing myths about the event but tackles the hardest question of all: why did it happen? Drawing on extensive interviews, police reports and his own reporting, Cullen meticulously pieces together what happened when 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold killed 13 people before turning their guns on themselves. The media spin was that specific students, namely jocks, were targeted and that Dylan and Eric were members of the Trench Coat Mafia. According to Cullen, they lived apparently normal lives, but under the surface lay an angry, erratic depressive (Klebold) and a sadistic psychopath (Harris), together forming a combustible pair. They planned the massacre for a year, outlining their intentions for massive carnage in extensive journals and video diaries. Cullen expertly balances the psychological analysis—enhanced by several of the nation's leading experts on psychopathology—with an examination of the shooting's effects on survivors, victims' families and the Columbine community. //(From Publishers Weekly)// || || In the winter of 1951, a storyteller, the last practitioner of an honored, centuries-old tradition, arrives at the home of nine-year-old Ronan O'Mara in the Irish countryside. For three wonderful evenings, the old gentleman enthralls his assembled local audience with narratives of foolish kings, fabled saints, and Ireland's enduring accomplishments before moving on. But these nights change young Ronan forever, setting him on a years-long pursuit of the elusive, itinerant storyteller and the glorious tales that are no less than the saga of his tenacious and extraordinary isle. (Barnes and Noble.com) ||
 * ==//Columbine// by Dave Cullen (2012)==
 * ==//Ireland// by Frank Delaney (2006)==