Grade 8
Book List
Students in Grade 8 must fill out the Reading Log. It would be preferable to print out the log if you can. But you may also make a copy of it in Google Drive and fill it out in the Google Doc if you need to.
8th Grade Honors students are assigned two books from the following list.
8th grade CP students are assigned one book from the list.
Science Fiction / Fantasy
The Luminaries
by Susan Dennard
The only thing Winnie has ever wanted is to be a Luminary, or hunter, in her small town of Hemlock Falls, home to many dangerous creatures mythical to humans. But when Winnie's father is labeled a traitor to the Luminaries, she and her family are cast out. She still has one shot at becoming a Luminary, though, if on her sixteenth birthday she can successfully complete three trials. Winnie recruits her ex–best friend, Jay, a promising hunter, to train her, and together they enter the forest and meet a creature more deadly than any encountered, but no one believes Winnie about the being. To solve the mystery of this strange new creature and to ensure her family's survival, Winnie must complete the trials—or die trying.
The Tomorrow Code
by Brian Falkner
It had happened before.
Burnt Mountain, Alaska.
Novosibirsk, Siberia.
Now it is about to happen to a thriving city.
A city with a population of 1.3 million people,
all of whom will be wiped out in a blink.
Unless it can be stopped.
Teenagers Tane Williams and Rebecca Richards hold the key to stop the destruction.
A message from the future.
Instructions that cannot be ignored.
Tane and Rebecca must act - and fast.
The survival of the human race depends on it.
Mystery
The Leaving
by Tara Altebrando
Five teens who were part of a group of six that vanished as kindergartners reappear as mysteriously as they went missing in this thriller. Scarlett, Lucas, Sarah, Adam, and Kristen are dropped off in a park, each with a map to their respective homes tucked into their pockets. None of them has any memory of how they got there, who was driving the van that dropped them off, nor where they've been for the past 11 years
That Weekend
by Kara Thomas
Her friends are missing from a camping trip gone bad and Claire can't remember anything, but she's determined to find them. After catching her boyfriend sneaking off with another girl, there's no way Claire is going to prom with him. Instead, she becomes a third wheel on a secret weekend trip to the mountains with her best friend, Kat, and Jesse, Kat's boyfriend. The worst Claire is expecting is having to witness too many PDA's between Jesse and Kat-especially since she has a secret crush on Jesse. When she wakes up alone on the mountain, hurt and with amnesia, that's when the real trouble begins. Kat and Jesse are missing, possibly dead, and Claire can't remember anything past their first night on the mountain.
Sports
The Final Four
by Paul Volponi
March Madness is in full swing, and there are only four teams let in the NCAA basketball championship. The heavily favored Michigan Spartans and the underdog Troy Trojans meet in the first game in the seminfinals, and it's there that the fates of Malcolm, Roko, Crispin, and M.J. intertwine. As the last moments tick down on the game clock, you'll learn how each player went from being a kid who loves to shoot hoops to a powerful force in one of the most important games of the year. Which team will leave the Superdome victorious? In the end it will come down to who has the most skill, the most drive, and the most heart.
Realistic Fiction
Runner
by Carl Deuker
When a new job falls his way, Chance jumps at the opportunity, becoming a runner who picks up strange packages on a daily route and delivers them to a shady man at the marina. Chase knows how much he will earn—what he doesn’t know is how much he will pay.
Adventure/Survival
Prisoner B-3087
by Alan Gratz
Survive. At any cost.
10 concentration camps. 10 different places where you are starved, tortured, and worked mercilessly. It's something no one could imagine surviving. But it is what Yanek Gruener has to face. As a Jewish boy in 1930s Poland, Yanek is at the mercy of the Nazis who have taken over. Everything he has, and everyone he loves, have been snatched brutally from him. Yanek, his arm tattooed with the words PRISONER B-3087, is forced from one nightmarish concentration camp to another, as World War II rages all around him. He encounters evil he could have never imagined, but also sees surprising glimpses of hope amid the horror. Will Yanek make it through the terror without losing his hope, his will -- and, most of all, his sense of who he really is inside?
Historical Fiction
Berliners
by Vesper Stamper
A riveting story about the rivalry between two brothers living on opposite sides of the Berlin wall during its construction in the 1960s. A city divided. A family fractured. Two brothers caught between past and present. Berlin, 1961. Rudi Moser-Fleischmann is an aspiring photographer with dreams of greatness, but he can't hold a candle to his talented, charismatic twin brother Peter, an ambitious actor. With the sudden divorce of their parents, the brothers find themselves living in different sectors of a divided Berlin; the postwar partition strangely mirroring their broken family. But one night, as the city sleeps, the Berlin Wall is hurriedly built, dividing society further, and Rudi and Peter are forced to choose between playing by the rules and taking their dreams underground.