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Katie Buckholtz English Classroom
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12th Grade
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It’s the summer of 1969, and
Bliss has been unceremoniously dumped by her hippie parents into
the custody of her grandmother. Soon Bliss finds herself adjusting
to life as a freshman at a fancy Atlanta school—and it’s a lot
different from life on the commune. Although she quickly finds
“normal” friends, she is drawn to Sandy, a gruff and unpopular
girl with a long-standing grudge against Sarah Lynn, the icy
beauty of the freshman class. The push and pull of the school
drama is engaging enough, but there’s another element pressurizing
the situation: an unsettling voice calling to Bliss from inside
one of the school buildings, a voice somehow related to strange
blood rituals and a long-ago suicide. |
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Seattle is rife with racial
tension as the city is terrorized by a serial murderer nicknamed
"Indian Killer" because the victims, all white, are scalped and
their bodies topped with a pair of white owl feathers. At the
center of the novel stands the mentally disintegrating John Smith,
a 6'6" Native American ignorant of his tribal roots because he was
adopted and raised by white parents. |
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The multigenerational saga of
two extended families who live on and around a Chippewa
reservation in North Dakota. Each chapter is narrated in a
memorable voice like the one of Lipsha Morrissey, a young man who
is believed to have "the touch," with which he attempts to bring
his wandering grandfather back to his long-suffering grandmother
with a love medicine made from goose hearts. By placing us right
inside the heads of her remarkable characters, Erdrich allows us
to feel the despair that insensitive government policies, poverty,
and alcoholism have brought them. |
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Anna was genetically engineered
to be a perfect match for her cancer-ridden older sister. Since
birth, the 13-year-old has donated platelets, blood, her umbilical
cord, and bone marrow as part of her family's struggle to lengthen
Kate's life. Anna is now being considered as a kidney donor in a
last-ditch attempt to save her 16-year-old sister. |
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Set in Little Bend, CO, and
North Dover, VT, Abrahams's novel follows Cody, 16, who sustains a
serious knee injury that leaves him on the bench during the most
important recruiting year in his high school career. With no
college scholarship in sight, he drops out of school. When his
rich girlfriend, Clea, is reported missing from her Vermont
boarding school, he drives East to find her and endangers himself
in the process. |
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14-year-old Lily Owen,
neglected by her father and isolated on their South Carolina peach
farm, spends hours imagining a blissful infancy when she was loved
and nurtured by her mother, Deborah, whom she barely remembers.
These consoling fantasies are her heart's answer to the family
story that as a child, in unclear circumstances, Lily accidentally
shot and killed her mother. All Lily has left of Deborah is a
strange image of a Black Madonna, with the words "Tiburon, South
Carolina" scrawled on the back. The search for a mother, and the
need to mother oneself, are crucial elements in this well-written
coming-of-age story set in the early 1960s against a background of
racial violence and unrest. When Lily's beloved nanny, Rosaleen,
manages to insult a group of angry white men on her way to
register to vote and has to skip town, Lily takes the opportunity
to go with her, fleeing to the only place she can think
of--Tiburon, South Carolina--determined to find out more about her
dead mother. |
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Achebe sketches a world in
which violence, war, and suffering exist, but are balanced by a
strong sense of tradition, ritual, and social coherence. His Ibo
protagonist, Okonkwo, is a self-made man. The son of a charming
ne'er-do-well, he has worked all his life to overcome his father's
weakness and has arrived, finally, at great prosperity and even
greater reputation among his fellows in the village of Umuofia.
Okonkwo is a champion wrestler, a prosperous farmer, husband to
three wives and father to several children. He is also a man who
exhibits flaws. |
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