Community Reading 2024

The Class Frances O'Roark Dowell (ISBN: 978-1481481793)

Sixth grade is a MOST confusing time. Best friends aren’t friends anymore. Worst enemies suddenly want to be partners in crime. And classmates you thought you knew have all sorts of surprising stuff going on. The kids in Mrs. Herrera’s class are dealing with all these things and more—specifically, three more:

1. There’s a new girl who just seems to be spying on them all and scribbling things in a notebook. Maybe she IS a spy?

2. Someone is stealing all of Mrs. Herrera’s most treasured items.

3. Their old classmate, Sam, keeps showing up and no one knows why…until they do.

Which leads to a fourth problem. But we can’t tell you about that yet. The twenty kids in Mrs. Herrera’s classroom can, though, and they do.

Every. Single. One. Of. Them. 

Recommended Grades: Whole Class Novel 6th Grade

Awards/ Honors: Edgar Award and William Allen White Award Winning Author

Two Degrees Alan Gratz (ISBN: 978-1338735673)

#1 New York Times bestselling author Alan Gratz (Refugee; Ground Zero) is back, tackling the urgent topic of climate change in this breathtaking, action-packed novel that will keep readers turning pages while making their own plans to better the world.

Fire. Ice. Flood. Three climate disasters. Four kids fighting for their lives.

Akira is riding her horse in the California woods when a wildfire sparks--and grows scarily fast. How can she make it to safety when there are flames everywhere?

Owen and his best friend, George, are used to seeing polar bears on the snowy Canadian tundra. But when one bear gets way too close for comfort, do the boys have any chance of surviving?

Natalie hunkers down at home as a massive hurricane barrels toward Miami. When the floodwaters crash into her house, Natalie is dragged out into the storm--with nowhere to hide.

Akira, Owen, George, and Natalie are all swept up in the devastating effects of climate change. They are also connected in ways that will shock them--and could alter their destinies forever.

Recommended Grades: 6-8

Awards/ Honors: A New York Times bestseller; An ABA Indie Bestseller; A USA Today Bestseller; A Junior Library Guild Selection; A Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Year; An Amazon Best Book of the Month

Three Times Lucky Sheila Turnage (ISBN: 978-0142426050)

Rising sixth grader Miss Moses LoBeau lives in the small town of Tupelo Landing, NC, where everyone's business is fair game and no secret is sacred. She washed ashore in a hurricane eleven years ago, and she's been making waves ever since. Although Mo hopes someday to find her "upstream mother," she's found a home with the Colonel--a café owner with a forgotten past of his own--and Miss Lana, the fabulous café hostess. She will protect those she loves with every bit of her strong will and tough attitude. So when a lawman comes to town asking about a murder, Mo and her best friend, Dale Earnhardt Johnson III, set out to uncover the truth in hopes of saving the only family Mo has ever known.

Recommended grades: 7-8

Awards/ Honors: A Newbery Honor Book; An ALA Notable Book; An Edgar Award Nominee; An E.B. White Read-Aloud Honor book; A SIBA young adult award winner; A YALSA Teens’ Top Ten Nominee; A Booklist Top 10 Crime Fiction for Youth 

The Seclusion Jacqui Jacqui Castle (ISBN:  978-1947848511)

While on a routine assignment scouting the country's dwindling natural resources, Patricia "Patch" and her best friend, Rexx, discover a cache of dangerous contraband-- printed books from before the Seclusion. These texts spark an unquenchable thirst for the truth that leads to the arrest of Patch's father by the totalitarian Board, which runs the entire country.

Evading their own arrest, Patch and Rexx set out across a ruined future United States. Along the way they learn how their country came to be this way, but their newfound knowledge may lead to their own demise.

Recommended Grades: 7-8

Awards/ Honors: Winner of the 2020 Indie Author of the Year Award; North Carolina Author Project Winner; Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Winner in Science Fiction

 
Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions Daniel Wallace (ISBN: 978-1616201647)

In his prime, Edward Bloom was an extraordinary man. He could outrun anybody. He never missed a day of school. He saved lives and tamed giants. Animals loved him, people loved him, women loved him. He knew more jokes than any man alive. At least that’s what he told his son, William. But now Edward Bloom is dying, and William wants desperately to know the truth about his elusive father—this indefatigable teller of tall tales—before it’s too late. So, using the few facts he knows, William re-creates Edward’s life in a series of legends and myths, through which he begins to understand his father’s great feats, and his great failings. The result is hilarious and wrenching, tender and outrageous.

Recommended for grades: 8-12

Awards/ Honors: Adapted into film by Tim Burton in 2003 and into a musical in 2013

Even as We Breathe Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle (ISBN: 978-1950564064)

Nineteen-year-old Cowney Sequoyah yearns to escape his hometown of Cherokee, North Carolina, in the heart of the Smoky Mountains. When a summer job at Asheville's luxurious Grove Park Inn and Resort brings him one step closer to escaping the hills that both cradle and suffocate him, he sees it as an opportunity. With World War II raging in Europe, the inn is the temporary home of Axis diplomats and their families, who are being held as prisoners of war. Soon, Cowney's refuge becomes a cage when the daughter of one of the residents goes missing and he finds himself accused of abduction and murder.

Even As We Breathe invokes the elements of bone, blood, and flesh as Cowney navigates difficult social, cultural, and ethnic divides. After leaving the seclusion of the Cherokee reservation, he is able to explore a future free from the consequences of his family's choices and to construct a new worldview, for a time. However, prejudice and persecution in the white world of the resort eventually compel Cowney to free himself from larger forces that hold him back as he struggles to unearth evidence of his innocence and clear his name.

Recommended for grades: 9-12

Awards/ Honors: Winner Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award 2021; NPR Best Book of 2020; Finalist Weatherford Award 2020

Sixty-One: Life Lessons from Papa, On and Off the Court Chris Paul (ISBN: 978-0525555377)

The day after future NBA superstar Chris Paul signed his letter of intent to play college basketball for Wake Forest, he received a world-shattering phone call. His grandfather, Nathaniel "Papa" Jones, a pillar of the Winston-Salem community where he owned and operated the first Black-owned service station in North Carolina, was mugged and ultimately died from a heart attack resulting from the assault. His funeral filled the largest church in the county, which held over one thousand people. He was sixty-one years old.

The day after burying his grandfather, Chris was coping the best way he knew how: by playing basketball for his high school team. After pouring in shot after shot, his last attempt was an airball purposely flung out of bounds from the foul line before Chris exited the game. The next day, local news headlines declared that he fell six points shy of the statewide single game high school scoring record. But he accomplished exactly what he set out to do: scoring sixty-one points, one for each year of life lived by his grandfather.

In Sixty-One, Chris opens up about life beyond basketball and the role his grandfather played in molding him into the man and father he is today. He’ll speak about the foundation of faith and family he built his life upon, what it means to be a positive light within your community and beyond, and the importance of setting the proper example for future generations. Most importantly, Chris will talk about his home, Winston-Salem, and the close-knit family and village that raised him to become one of the most respected leaders in all of sports.

Recommended for grades: 9-12

Awards/ Honors: New York Times Bestseller

Legendborn Tracy Deonn (ISBN: 978-1534441606)

After her mother dies in an accident, sixteen-year-old Bree Matthews wants nothing to do with her family memories or childhood home. A residential program for bright high schoolers at UNC–Chapel Hill seems like the perfect escape—until Bree witnesses a magical attack her very first night on campus.

A flying demon feeding on human energies.

A secret society of so called “Legendborn” students that hunt the creatures down.

And a mysterious teenage mage who calls himself a “Merlin” and who attempts—and fails—to wipe Bree’s memory of everything she saw.

The mage’s failure unlocks Bree’s own unique magic and a buried memory with a hidden connection: the night her mother died, another Merlin was at the hospital. Now that Bree knows there’s more to her mother’s death than what’s on the police report, she’ll do whatever it takes to find out the truth, even if that means infiltrating the Legendborn as one of their initiates.

Recommended for grades: 9-12

Awards/ Honors: Coretta Scott King Award for New Talent; Los Angeles Times Book Prize

The Edge of Anything Nora Shalaway Carpenter (ISBN: 978-0762467587) 

Len is a loner teen photographer haunted by a past that's stagnated her work and left her terrified she's losing her mind. Sage is a high school volleyball star desperate to find a way around her sudden medical disqualification. Both girls need college scholarships. After a chance encounter, the two develop an unlikely friendship that enables them to begin facing their inner demons.

But both Len and Sage are keeping secrets that, left hidden, could cost them everything, maybe even their lives.

Set in the North Carolina mountains, The Edge of Anything explores the transformative power of friendship and how it can help you find yourself and the goodness in life, even when everything feels broken. 

Recommended for grades: 9-12

Awards/ Honors: A Bank Street Best Book of 2021; A Best Book of the Year: Kirkus Reviews; A Mighty Girl A Cybils Awards Finalist; The 2021 North Carolina Humanities Discover Great Places Through Reading selection 

Me Talk Pretty One Day David Sedaris (ISBN: 978-0316776967) 

Me Talk Pretty One Day, published in 2000, is a bestselling collection of essays by American humorist David Sedaris. The book is separated into two parts. The first part consists of essays about Sedaris’s life before his move to Normandy, France, including his upbringing in suburban Raleigh, North Carolina, his time working odd jobs in New York City, and a visit to New York from a childhood friend and her bumpkinish girlfriend. The second section, "Deux", tells of Sedaris’s move to Normandy with his partner Hugh, often drawing humor from his efforts to live in France without speaking French and his frustrated attempts to learn it. Prior to publication, several of the essays were read by the author on the Public Radio International program, This American Life. It takes readers on a journey through Sedaris' life, filled with witty observations and laugh-out-loud moments.

Recommended Courses: Honors English 10, AP Language, AP Literature, and English 11/12 

Awards/ Honors: Thurber Prize for American Humor

Cold Mountain Charles Frazier (ISBN: 978-0802126757)

Cold Mountain, the extraordinary story of a soldier’s perilous journey back to his beloved at the end of the Civil War, is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished land, a place where savagery coexists with splendor and human beings contend with the inhuman solitude of the wilderness. Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, a Confederate soldier named Inman decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains to Ada, the woman he loves. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal conversation with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, the intrepid Ada is trying to revive her father’s derelict farm and learning to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away. As it interweaves their stories, Cold Mountain asserts itself as an authentic odyssey, hugely powerful, majestically lovely, and keenly moving.

Recommended for grades: 10-12

Awards/ Honors: Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction in 1997; Weatherford Award 1997; Boeke Prize 1997