Grade 9

A bestselling modern classic—both poignant and funny—about a boy with autism who sets out to solve the murder of a neighbor's dog and discovers unexpected truths about himself and the world.

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read

Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow.

This improbable story of Christopher's quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog makes for one of the most captivating, unusual, and widely heralded novels in recent years.

I AM STILL ALIVE are the words that 16-year-old Jess Cooper keeps repeating to herself. With only a wolf dog named Bo for company, she finds herself alone in the Canadian wilderness after the murder of her father. Her life in Seattle had been upended after a car crash that killed her mother and left Jess with an injured leg and scarred face. When the court insists on reuniting Jess with the father she hasn't seen since she was 4, she's sent off to live with him in Alaska. But Jess' secretive survivalist father isn't in Alaska, he's moved to a remote cabin in the Canadian wilderness that's only accessible by seaplane. 

The Crown’s Game is a thrilling and atmospheric historical fantasy set in Imperial Russia about two teenagers who must compete for the right to become the Imperial Enchanter—or die in the process—from debut author Evelyn Skye.

Vika Andreyeva can summon the snow and turn ash into gold. Nikolai Karimov can see through walls and conjure bridges out of thin air. They are enchanters—the only two in Russia—and with the Ottoman Empire and the Kazakhs threatening, the tsar needs a powerful enchanter by his side.

And so he initiates the Crown’s Game, an ancient duel of magical skill—the greatest test an enchanter will ever know.  

It's 1968 during the height of the Vietnam War, with the first lunar landing on the horizon. When eighth grader Doug Swietek (who was a secondary character in author Gary D. Schmidt's Newbery Honor-winning Wednesday Wars) and his family move to a small town in upstate New York after his bad-tempered father loses his job, Doug immediately dubs the town "stupid." After he meets local girl Lil, everything changes. Lil challenges him to prove he is not the "skinny thug" everyone assumes he is. Following her into the library, he finds the works of Audubon on display and befriends a librarian, who coaxes him to try drawing. 

Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party is gaining strength and becoming more menacing every day. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor upset by the complacency of the German church toward the suffering around it, forms a breakaway church to speak out against the established political and religious authorities. When the Nazis outlaw the church, he escapes as a fugitive. Struggling to reconcile his faith and the teachings of the Bible with the Nazi Party’s evil agenda, Bonhoeffer decides that Hitler must be stopped by any means possible

Thirteen-year-old English schoolboy Conor's mother has been sick for the past year but she is getting treatments, and Conor won't let himself think that she might not get better. Until the night the monster comes. Although Conor feels a surprising lack of fear of the giant walking tree, the monster warns him that he will be afraid before the end, and this warning hangs over the book as readers get to know Conor. 

DIGGING FOR PEAT in the mountain with his Uncle Tally, Fergus finds the body of a child, and it looks like she’s been murdered. As Fergus tries to make sense of the mad world around him—his brother on hunger-strike in prison, his growing feelings for Cora, his parents arguing over the Troubles, and him in it up to the neck, blackmailed into acting as courier to God knows what—a little voice comes to him in his dreams, and the mystery of the bog child unfurls..