High School Reads!

by Nicola Yoon Lexile:  650 Genre:  Realistic Fiction Natasha has one day left in New York City.  She and her family are being deported to Jamaica because her parents entered the country illegally many years ago.  Natasha is trying everything she can to get the deportation order removed.  New York is the only place she has ever called home and she has no desire to leave.  On her last day in New York City, she meets Daniel.  Daniel is the second son in a Korean family who is trying to live up to his family's expectation that he get into a good college so that he can become a doctor.  On the way to his alumni interview for Yale, he runs into Natasha.  Neither one realizes how their separate lives are about to converge for just one day.

by Jeannette Walls Genre:  Biography In Half Broke Horses , Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle , tells the story of her grandmother, the formidable Lily Casey Smith.  Lily lived the rough and tough life of a rancher's daughter.  She was helping her father break in horses at the age of 6.  She survived floods, droughts, tornadoes, and the Great Depression.  She and her husband, Jim, didn't have a lot of money, but they weren't afraid of hard work.  Lily set goals for herself that she nearly always achieved.  With only an 8th grade education, she passed the state teaching exam and rode her pony 500 miles to get her first teaching job.  The first time she saw an airplane she knew that one day she would take flying lessons.   Half Broke Horses is the story of an amazing woman who lived a long and full life.

by Anita Shreve Lexile:  760 Genre:  Realistic Fiction Kathryn, Jack, and Mattie seem to be living a charmed life.  Jack is a pilot so he is frequently gone on long trips, but Kathryn and Mattie have adjusted.  As a pilot's wife, Kathryn knows that there is some danger associated with his job, so when a knock at the door comes late at night, Kathryn fears the worst.  And there on her doorstep, stands a representative from the airline who tells Kathryn that the plane her husband was on, has crashed.  Kathryn knows that her life and Mattie's life have just changed forever, but she has no idea what her husband has been hiding...