SYNOPSIS FOR NOVEL STUDY UNIT

 

Bronx Masquerade  Nikki Grimes

 

When Wesley Boone writes a poem for his high school English class and reads it aloud, poetry-slam-style, he kicks off a revolution. Soon his classmates are clamoring to have weekly poetry sessions. One by one, eighteen students take on the risky challenge of self-revelation. Award-winning author Nikki Grimes captures the voices of eighteen teenagers through the poetry they share and the stories they tell, and exposes what lies beneath the skin, behind the eyes, beyond the masquerade. I REALLY ENJOYED. SHOWED THE POWER OF BINDING RELATIONSHIPS BY UNCOVERING ONE’S DEEP SECRETS. MRS. MCDEE

 

Shakespeare’s Daughter Peter W. Hassinger

 

Susanna Shakespeare finds the small town of Stratford-upon-Avon much too quiet and provincial. She yearns to travel to London to see her father's world of players and poets, and to follow a secret dream of her own. Once Susanna arrives in London, nothing is quite as she expected it to be -- least of all her relationship with her famous father. But propelled by her love for Thomas Cole, a Catholic chorister, and her desire to sing, Susanna discovers that it is only with the support of those who love her that she has the strength to succeed. FICTIONAL BUT VERY INTERESTING.

MRS. MCDEE

 

Margaux With An X  Ron Koertge

 

Gorgeous Margaux has grown weary of her usual social scene: cynical repartee with her best friend, Sara; shopping; and dates with vacuous jocks. Home with her remote parents--a "dazed," channel-surfing mother and a professional gambler father--is even more bleak. Desperate to find a meaningful connection with someone who can match her sharp wit and astonishing vocabulary, Margaux finds herself drawn to Danny, a skinny, bookish junior. As the surprising pair forms an intense bond, each confronts deep childhood sorrows. Margaux's "specialty" is "conversation meant to baffle," and Koertge's own narrative, like Margaux's speech, is laden with self-consciously challenging vocabulary and opaque, overreaching metaphors, resulting in a confused blurring between narrative and character voices. Still, the dramatic situations and sympathetic characters' painful secrets will intrigue teens, particularly language lovers who, like Margaux and Danny, have opened a thesaurus for fun.

A BIT DIFFICYLT AT TIMES. MRS. MCDEE

 

Honey. Baby, Sweetheart  Deb Caletti

 

Ultimately rewarding, this novel about a high school girl who steps out of her role as "The Quiet Girl" for a summer of "passion and adventure... the stuff of the books at the Nine Mile Library where my mother works," shares both the strengths and pitfalls of Caletti's The Queen of Everything. When Ruby gets involved with handsome, motorcycle-riding and rich Travis, she likes that he sees her as fearless. But he is also dangerous, and spellbound Ruby gradually gets sucked into first reckless and then criminal acts. In a concerted effort to help Ruby break away from Travis, her librarian mother, who has just endured a betrayal of her own, begins overseeing Ruby's schedule and takes her to the book club she facilitates for feisty senior citizens, the Casserole Queens—which leads to a whole other story line involving one of their members, a stroke victim who may or may not have been the lover of a famous author. There is a lot of plot, often requiring the audience's leaps of faith over not especially believable moments, and Caletti's prose, laden with strikingly apt comparisons, can make this book feel dense. Even so, so much here is uncommonly vivid, especially the exchanges among Ruby, her mother and her younger brother. Readers who stay with it will find thoughtful and authentically inspiring messages about trusting in themselves enough to insist on a love that means more than being someone's "honey, baby, sweetheart”. HAVEN’T READ THIS ONE BUT LIKED THE IDEA OF THE CASSEROLE QUEENS AS IT RELATES TO YOUR SERVICE FOR THE YEAR. MRS. MCDEE

 

The Secret Life of Bees  by Sue Monk

 

Sue Monk Kidd's ravishing debut novel has stolen the hearts of reviewers and readers alike with its strong, assured voice. Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the town's fiercest racists, Lily decides they should both escape to Tiburon, South Carolina--a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. There they are taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters who introduce Lily to a mesmerizing world of bees, honey, and the Black Madonna who presides over their household. This is a remarkable story about divine female power and the transforming power of love--a story that women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come. I REALLY ENJOYED THIS ONE. MRS. MCDEE

 

Here Today  Ann M Martin

 

In 1963, Ellie's mother, Doris Day Dingman, was crowned the Bosetti Beauty at Mr. Bosetti's supermarket, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and the Dingmans began to fall apart." So begins 11-yr-old Eleanor Roosevelt Dingman's story. Ellie, who is about to start 6th grade in the small town of Spectacle, NY, is the oldest child in her off-center family. Her father works construction jobs, while her mother, Doris, has only one dream - to become a rich and famous actress. But when that dream leads to Doris's abandonment of the family, it is Ellie who is called upon to take charge. MIGHT BE A BIT REPETITIVE.  MRS. MCDEE

 

The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place  e.l. konigsburg

 

Twelve year old Margaret Rose Kane is incorrigible. Not only does she refuse to bend to the will of her manipulative cabin mates at Camp Talequa, she stands up to and inadvertently insults the camp director and Queen-in-residence, Mrs. Kaplan. The intimidating and cruel confrontations that threaten to break Margaret's spririt only serve to strengthen her resolve, and everyone is happy when Margaret is finally banished/rescued from Camp Talequa. Luckily for her, with her parents in Peru, this means she can spend the rest of the summer with her delightfully eccentric Hungarian great-uncles, Alexander and Morris Rose. Margaret adores her great-uncles, and loves the house at 19 Schuyler Place--especially the three peculiar clock towers (tall painted structures covered in pendants made from broken china, crystal, bottles, jars, and clock parts) that the Rose brothers have been building for as long as she can remember. For Margaret and the Rose brothers, the towers represent beauty for beauty's sake--they sparkle in the sun and sing in the wind--they exist only to spread joy. Not everyone loves the towers however, and forty-five years after the birth of the project, the city council declares the towers "unsafe," and demands that they be dismantled and destroyed. Filled with the same fiery resolve that helped her survive Camp Talequa, Margaret (with the help of a handyman named Jake, a loyal dog named Tartufo, and few other unexpected allies) launches a plan to save the towers in the name of art, history, and beauty. I ENJOYED!!! REENFORCES THE POWER OF A FEMALE VOICE. MRS. MCDEE

 

Make Lemonade  Virginia E. Wolff

 

In "Make Lemonade" we have a story about self-discovery and self-recovery. LaVaughn is fourteen years old and is going to go to college someday. She knows this fact better than she knows anything else. Of course, that means she needs money, and so she answers an ad for a babysitter. The woman (if you can call her that) advertising is Jolly, a seventeen year-old single mother of a two year-old and a baby. As LaVaughn and Jolly get to know one another, the younger girl begins to see clearly the cracks and fissures in Jolly's madcap desperate life. As the two grow closer LaVaughn has to try to simultaneously help Jolly out while maintaining her own integrity and dealing with the guilt and enabling issues of being her employer's only friend.

 

The book moves from practical situations and motions to philosophical ponderings about the nature of existence itself. Written entirely in free verse in a series of sixty-six poems (of a sort) we learn more about the characters and their lives through this unique medium than we could have ever hoped to with prose. Wolff is an accomplished writer, her stories capturing the honesty of the hardships that come with poverty. HAVE ONLY SKIMMED THIS ONE. LOOKS GOOD THOUGH. MRS. MCDEE

 

True Believer (Sequel to Make Lemonade) Virginia E. Wolff

 

At 15, LaVaughn already knows that life is hard and that getting ahead takes a strong mind and an even stronger will. Surrounded by poverty and violence, she strives every day not to be just another inner-city statistic: "My hope is strong like an athlete. Every morning when we walk through the metal detectors to get into school ... it is an important day of dues-paying so I can go to college and be out of here." Last year when she babysat for Jolly, a young unwed mother, she saw firsthand how an unplanned pregnancy can diminish options. So she ignores the boys, studies hard, and hopes it will all be enough to get her into college. Then Jody moves back into the neighborhood. Once LaVaughn's childhood friend, Jody is now "suddenly beautiful... He could be in movies the way the parts of his face go together." If LaVaughn's choices were difficult before Jody, now they're almost impossible. What LaVaughn doesn't know is that Jody has difficult decisions of his own to make--decisions that could turn her carefully ordered world upside down. CHOSEN BECAUSE IT IS A SEQUEL TO MAKE LEMONADE. MRS. MCDEE

The second novel in a proposed trilogy, True Believer picks up where the acclaimed Make Lemonade left off. Virginia Euwer Wolff's verse-prose is as sumptuous as ever, and her descriptions of LaVaughn's day-to-day life and feelings are sympathetic and achingly real. Readers will be eager to see where LaVaughn's choices take her in Wolff's next installment. HAVEN’T READ THIS ONE AT ALL. MRS. MCDEE

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants  Ann Brashares

 

They were just a soft, ordinary pair of thrift-shop jeans until the four girls took turns trying them on--four girls, that is, who are close friends, about to be parted for the summer, with very different sizes and builds, not to mention backgrounds and personalities. Yet the pants settle on each girl's hips perfectly, making her look sexy and long-legged and feel confident as a teenager can feel. "These are magical Pants!" they realize, and so they make a pact to share them equally, to mail them back and forth over the summer from wherever they are. Beautiful, distant Lena is going to Greece to be with her grandparents; strong, athletic Bridget is off to soccer camp in Baja, California; hot-tempered Carmen plans to have her divorced father all to herself in South Carolina; and Tibby the rebel will be left at home to slave for minimum wage at Wallman's.

Over the summer the Pants come to represent the support of the sisterhood, but they also lead each girl into bruising and ultimately healing confrontations with love and courage, dying and forgiveness. Lena finds her identity in Greece and the courage not to reject love; Bridget gets in over her head with an older camp coach; Carmen finds her father ensconced with a new fiancée and family; and Tibby unwillingly takes on a filmmaking apprentice who is dying of leukemia. Each girl's story is distinct and engrossing, told in a brightly contemporary style. Like the Pants, the reader bounces back and forth among the four unfolding adventures, and the melange is spiced with letters and witty quotes. Ann Brashares has here created four captivating characters and seamlessly interwoven their stories for a young adult novel that is fresh and absorbing. ENJOYED IMMENSELY. MRS. MCDEE

The Second Summer of the Traveling Pants  Ann Brashares

Like the summer before, Carmen, Bridget, Tibby, and Lena share their individual adventures with the Pants collective, creating an engaging, kaleidoscopic narrative of four voices. This summer, Tibby attends a film program in Virginia and Bridget (Bee), whose mother has died, impulsively jets off to Alabama to get reacquainted with her estranged grandmother. Lovely Lena tries to protect herself from the heartbreak of loving her long-distance Greek god boyfriend Kostos, and Carmen deals (poorly) with her mother dating again and having the nerve to borrow the Pants!

The Second Summer, while breezy and fun to read, deals seriously with love lost and found, death, and finding the courage to live honestly. The teens' lessons are often painful, but the Sisterhood prevails. Quotations from luminaries such as Charlie Brown ("Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love") to Nelson Mandela ("There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered") open each chapter and cleverly reflect the novel's many moods. ENJOYED THIS SEQUEL. MRS. MCDEE

Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Traveling Pants  Ann Prashares

Best buds Tibby, Carmen, Lena and Bridget are back with their magical pair of shared jeans in Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood. Each summer brings new and difficult challenges, as the perennially separated friends discover afresh this last season before college. Tibby struggles with the idea of close friend Brian becoming her boyfriend, and their fragile relationship is soon tested by a tragedy in her immediate family. Carmen doesn’t know how to react when she finds out that her middle-aged mom is pregnant, and Bridget is unpleasantly surprised to be reunited with the boy who broke her heart two summers ago. Finally, Lena, still coming to terms with the loss of her first love, tries to convince her strict father that art school is a better career path than Greek restaurant management. But through every crisis, each girl is assured of the love and support of the created sisterhood when she pulls on the denim armor of the cherished, and by now, a bit fragrant ("Rule # 1. You must never wash the Pants.") Traveling Pants. HAVEN’T READ THIS ONE YET BUT AM LOOKING FORWARD TO IT. MRS. MCDEE

The Earth, My Butt and all Things Round  Carolyn Mackler

Sophomore Virginia Shreves lives in Manhattan and attends a prestigious private school. She lives by her Fat Girl Code of Conduct. She has a budding romance with Froggy the Fourth, but she doesn't want his wandering hands to feel her fat. Her baggy clothing helps her to "hide." Her mother, Dr. Phyllis Shreves, is an adolescent psychologist obsessed with her imperfect daughter's weight, and her father is rarely around. Her older sister joined the Peace Corps to escape mom, and brother Byron is big man on the Columbia campus-until he's suspended for date rape. Finally, Virginia stands up to her mother and takes charge of her life. Strong points in the novel are the issue of date rape and its consequences and, however glossed over, eating disorders. Parental pressure is overdone. Mom and dad are stereotypical of adults so involved in themselves that they cannot see their child for who she is. Some passages are very well done, but the book has an uneven quality in prose style and character development. Told through first-person narrative, journal entries, and e-mail, Virginia's story will interest readers who are looking for one more book with teen angst, a bit of romance, and a kid who is a bit like them or their friends.

Gentlehands  M.E.Kerr

Buddy Boyle lives year-round with his family in unfashionable Seaville, New York, in a cramped little house on the bay. Skye Pennington spends the summers nearby on lavish estate complete with ocean view and a butler named Peacock.

But Skye and Buddy fall in love anyway. And every once in a while they visit Buddy's estranged grandfather, who makes them forget they're from opposite sides of town. Then a reporter appears, searching for a man known as Gentlehands, a man with a horrifying past. Who is Gentlehands? And what is his connection to Buddy's handsome, aristocratic grandfather? The mystery threatens to shatter Buddy and Skye's relationship, and change their lives forever. REALLY ENJOYED. THIS WILL BE READ FOR THE L.I.V.E. PROGRAM THIS YEAR FOR INCOMING 9^TH GRADERS. MRS. MCDEE

Pigs in Heaven (Sequel to The Bean Trees) Barbara Kingsolver

Taylor Greer and her adopted Cherokee daughter Turtle, first met in The Bean Trees, will captivate readers anew in Kingsolver's assured and eloquent sequel, which mixes wit, wisdom and the expert skills of a born raconteur into a powerfully affecting narrative. Now six years old and still bearing psychological marks of the abuse that occured before she was rescued by Taylor, Turtle is discovered by formidable Indian lawyer Annawake Fourkiller, who insists that the child be returned to the Cherokee Nation. Taylor reacts by fleeing her Tucson home with Turtle to begin a precarious existence on the road; skirting the edge of poverty and despair, she eventually realizes that Turtle has become emotionally unmoored. In taking a fresh look at the Solomonic dilemma of choosing between two equally valid claims on a child's life, Kingsolver achieves the admirable feat of making the reader understand and sympathize with both sides of the controversy, as she contrasts Taylor's inalterable mother's love with Annawake's determination to save Turtle from the stigmatization she can expect from white society. The chronicle acquires depth and humor when Kingsolver integrates the story of Taylor's mother Alice, a woman who believes that the Greers are "doomed to be a family with no men in it" (that she is proven wrong adds a delicious element of romance to the story). Alice's resolve to help her daughter takes her into the heart of the Cherokee Nation and results in an astonishing but credible meshing of lives. In the end, both justice and compassion are served. Kingsolver's intelligent consideration of issues of family and culture--both in her evocation of Native American society and in her depiction of the plight of a single mother--brims with insight and empathy. Every page of this beautifully controlled narrative offers prose shimmering with imagery and honed to simple lyric intensity. In short, the delights of superior fiction can be experienced here. I ENJOYED THIS ONE. MS GIOIA DID THIS BOOK TALK LAST YEAR FOR THE L.I.V.E. PROGRAM. MRS. MCDEE

Enemy Women by Paulette Jules

Enemy Women leads us into new terrain, both geographic and historical, in the war between the states. Set in the Missouri Ozarks during the Civil War, Jiles's story focuses on the trying times of 18-year-old heroine Adair Colley. When a group of renegade Union militiamen attacks the Colley home, stealing family possessions, burning everything down, and taking away her father--an apolitical judge--Adair gathers the remnants of her clothes and mounts a rescue effort. Unfortunately, she is falsely accused of being a Confederate spy, a charge that lands her in a squalid women's prison run by a decent commandant embarrassed by his post. After he helps her escape, the two agree to seek out one another after the war; their separate, harrowing journeys and the evolution of each character throughout make for breathtaking action and powerful writing. Each chapter of Enemy Women begins with excerpts from historical testimony about this terrible period in the Civil War, when marauding soldiers pillaged and murdered whole families and communities at will. These documents add depth and resonance to Jiles's remarkable narrative. HAVEN’T READ THIS ONE BUT IT HAS BEEN ACCLAIMED IF YOU LIKE FICTIONAL HISTORY. MRS. MCDEE

Girl, 15, Charming But Insane  Sue Limb

 

Life was tragic enough before this spring started. With a distinct lack of boobage and an arse so big that birds of prey could nest within its shadows, Jess Jordan is saddled with the Goddess Flora for a best friend, a Britney Spears look-alike so gorgeous that one grain of her divine dandruff could make the blind see again. Jess knows that her soul mate is Ben Jones, a divine mixture of Leonardo diCaprio, Prince William, and Brad Pitt who oozes mystery and charisma. But the campaign to get Ben to notice her brings on a cavalcade of mortification and disaster, including, but not limited to, a minestrone soup explosion that takes place in her bra and a schoolwide viewing of a videotape that features a topless Jess referring to her breasts as "Bonnie" and "Clyde."

Meanwhile, Jess’s death-obsessed Granny moves into her bedroom, along with her grandfather’s remains; her hypochondriac dad, who sends her daily "horrorscopes" like "You will fall asleep with your mouth open, and a family of earwigs will move in," acts strange about Jess staying with him this summer; and her longtime friend Fred, a television violence addict and closet thumbsucker, has decided that he can’t stand being around her. Jess is determined to make things right . . . but with her offbeat sense of humor and her wildly active imagination, things get complicated along the way. HILARIOUS!!!!! I CANNOT WAIT FOR A SEQUEL!!!!  Mrs. McDee

SYNOPSISES COURTESY OF AMAZON.COM