Greater Lowell Technical High

School

250 Pawtucket Blvd

Tyngsboro, MA 01879

(978)454-5411

Summer Reading List

    Are your kids looking forward to summer vacation? Great! But don't toss out those books and pencils yet -"summer fun" doesn't have to mean "dumber fun"! Exercising kids' brain muscles all summer brings big benefits in the fall. And not exercising them can mean a loss of hard-earned skills. A wise parent or caregiver can sneak a lot of learning into those lazy, hazy days. Any daily reading, yes, even comic books, is good for your child's brain. The secret is for the child to choose the subject, so that it doesn't feel like homework and he or she is truly reading for pleasure. Here at Greater Lowell Tech we have developed a multicultural, multi-topic summer reading list allowing your child to find the required two books to read this summer. We have created a reading guide to support your child’s reading efforts and to increase his/her comprehension and writing skills. The single most important activity that can help students to achieve in school is their ability to read. Reading, though, has become a lost art. Recently a national report declared we have a literacy crisis in our country. In response to this report, Greater Lowell Tech has developed a required comprehensive summer reading list with accompanying guide to encourage, support, and improve our students’ reading abilities. During the last decade English Language Arts teachers throughout the nation have complained about poor reading habits of their students. Experts claim that readers do well on S.A.T. tests, non-readers do poorly. Stanovich and other reading experts assert that people get better at reading by practicing reading. Practice makes perfect.

Purpose: The purpose of this summer reading program is to provide opportunities for students to practice their reading. We want summer reading to help students to do the following:

• Read more willingly and more often

• Become more interested in the printed word in general, including their own writing

• Become more receptive to enrichment activities related to their reading

• Discover that they can think and write in a meaningful way about their readings

• Discover that literature can move them and enrich their lives

• Most importantly learn to enjoy reading and enrich an important life long skill

SUMMER READING LIST

I. DEFINITIONS

MANDATORY: Required or assigned by school authorities obliging each student to read at least one book.

GRAPHIC ORGANIZER: Graphic organizers, an example of a post-reading activity, provide a visual means for organizing and analyzing material and can often be geared directly to specific types of texts. These organizers help children summarize material and understand the organization, and they act as models for children writing their own stories.

II. POLICY: Read at least one book on the list and complete a Book Report Form. Turn in your complete reading guide to your teacher at the beginning of the school year. Students who do not complete the summer reading requirements will be reported to parents/guardians. The summer reading will be included in first marking period averages.

III. EVALUATION: Your teacher will determine by your completed Reading Guide and responses, whether you accomplished your summer reading requirements.

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Books for summer reading PDF

12th GRADE Reading

Jazmin’s Notebook
Nikki Grimes
Funny, tender, angry, and tough Jazmin’s diary entries and occasional poems about growing up in Harlem in the 1960’s make us share her struggle to find community and her own space.

The Wreckers
Iain Lawrence
It is dark and stormy night when a merchant ship is lured onto the rocks of the Cornish coast. Part survival story, part historical fiction, this tale, narrated by one of the ship’s survivors, is a page-turner.

I Am Mordred: A tale from Camelot
Nancy Springer
Springer humanizes Arthurian arch-villain Mordred in a thoroughly captivating and poignant tale that follows Mordred as he tries to sort out his love-hate feelings for his father.

The Rag and Bone Shop
Robert Comier
Cormier's (published posthumously, is characteristically dark and thought provoking) Characters include :Trent, an ambitious and renowned interrogator who holds a perfect record wrenching confessionals out of criminals, and 12-year-old Jason Dorrant, suspected of murdering his neighbor, seven-year-old Alicia Bartlett. The killing attracts much publicity plus the attention of a senator. The local police, anxious to solve the case quickly, call on the expertise of Trent to get Jason, the last person seen with the victim, to confess to the crime.

Tell No One
Harlan Coben
After eight years of struggling with grief over his wife’s murder by a serial killer, Dr. David Beck receives a mysterious e-mail including a secret word only the two of them knew.

The Lords of Discipline
Pat Conroy
Cadets at a southern military academy face hazing, hatred, and prejudice as they confront members of a secret society dedicated to preserving traditions.

And Still We Rise: The Trials and Triumphs of Twelve Gifted Inner-City Students
Miles, Corwin
The award-winning reporter for the Los Angeles Times chronicles the incredible challenges faced by high school seniors in a South-Central Los Angeles gifted program.

America: A Novel
E.R. Frank
The enduring love of this foster mother and a dedicated therapist are fifteen-year-old America’s only positive life forces in this disturbing powerful story of forgiveness and “against the odds” survival.

All the Pretty Horses
Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy’s great epic Border Trilogy whose first novel, All the Pretty Horses, has become McCarthy’s most famous. It tells the story of 20th century cowboys. The book examines characters desperately trying to inhabit the cowboy myth and to subscribe to the cowboy code of stoicism.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – (recommended for College English)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
After serving eight years in various prisons and labor camps in Russia, Solzhenitsyn wrote One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This work was the first public mention of forced collectivization of farms and of forced labor camps in Russia. The novel take us through a typical day of Ivan Denisovich, a prisoner at a Stalinist labor camp in 1951.

The Bell Jar – (recommended for College English)
Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar is an autobiographical novel that conforms closely to the events of the author’s life. The Bell Jar recounts, in slightly fictional form, the events of the summer and autumn after Plath’s junior year at Smith College. Psychological treatment and suicide are a large part of the novel’s plot.

The Plague – (recommended for College English)
Albert Camus
Throughout his life, Camus was deeply concerned with the problem of human suffering in an indifferent world. In The Plague, Camus addresses the collective response to catastrophe when a large city in Algeria is isolated due to an outbreak of the bubonic plague.

In Cold Blood – (recommended for College English)
Truman Capote
Capote based this novel on a small newspaper article describing the murder of a Kansas ranch family of four. Capote became close to the murderers, the townspeople of Holcomb, Kansas and did much research into the police investigation in writing this epic nonfiction novel.

Catch-22 – (recommended for College English)
Joseph Heller
Heller wrote Catch-22 based on his own Air Force experience. It is a war story that is at once hilarious, grotesque, cynical and stirring. Catch-22 relies heavily on humor to convey the insanity of war and presenting the horrible meaninglessness of armed conflict.

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster – NON-FICTION
Jon Krakauer, (Introduction) – (recommended for all levels)
A riveting first-hand account of a catastrophic expedition up Mount Everest. In March 1996, Outside magazine sent veteran journalist and seasoned climber Jon Krakauer on an expedition led by celebrated Everest guide Rob Hall. Despite the expertise of Hall and the other leaders, by the end of summit day eight people were dead.

Snow in August – NON-FICTION
Peter Hamill – (recommended for all levels)
The story of an unlikely friendship (Michael Devlin and a lonely rabbi from Prague) – and of how the neighborhood reacts to it. For Michael, the rabbi opens a window to ancient learning and lore that rival anything in Captain Marvel. For the rabbi, Michael illuminates the everyday mysteries of America, including the strange language of baseball. But like their hero Jackie Robinson, neither can entirely escape from the swirling prejudices of the time. Terrorized by a local gang of anti-Semitic Irish toughs, Michael and the rabbi are caught in an escalating spiral of hate for which there’s only one way out – a miracle.

11th GRADE Reading

The Things They Carried
Tim O’Brien
This novel depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and of course, the character Tim O'Brien who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three.

The Watsons Go to Birmingham
Christopher Paul Curtis
Humorous portrayal of African American family life in Flint, Michigan during the 1960s;explores issues and effects of racism through the eyes of a ten-year old boy; a story of strong family values, courage, and coming of age.

You Don't Know Me
Davis Klass
No one knows who the real John is. Not his mother, to whom he feels invisible, not his friend who is not a friend, not the man who is not his father, the students at his anti-school, and not the music teacher who tries to help him. In his house that is not a house, the man who is not John's father abuses him severely, and John is afraid to confide the secret to anyone.

Phoenix Rising
Karen Hesse
Teenager Nyle and her grandmother raise sheep on their Vermont farm. In a post-nuclear accident future, Nyle wishes to be isolated from anyone with radiation sickness, while her grandmother wants to take in Ezra and his mother, two unfortunate people infected with the deadly disease.

Under the Blood-Red Sun
Graham Salisbury
It was an ordinary Sunday morning at Pearl Harbor. Tomi releasing the homing pigeons for their daily exercise. Then came the first explosions. Tomi looked up to see the rising sun on the attacking plane’s wings; Grandpa ran out of the house waving Japanese flag. Tomi’s world will never be the same, but some things never change, his family, his friends, the Rats.

The Jacket
Andrew Clements
When Phil accuses an African American boy of stealing his younger brother’s jacket, he discovers what prejudice really is. Each boy learns about the other and by doing so, most importantly, they learn about themselves.


Morning Girl
Michael Dorris
This book is the story of a girl, Morning Girl, and her brother, Star Boy, two Native Americans of the Taino Tribe. It tells of their family and community as they grow up together in the Bahamas in the fateful year of 1492. Morning Girl and her brother are anxious about change, but the change isn’t one they will look forward to at the end.

War Letters
Andrew Carroll
These are, as Carroll writes, "the first, unfiltered drafts of history." His rich sample testifies to the universal and poignant themes of love and honor, courage and rage, duty and fear and mortality. The playful and heartfelt voices grant us the personal perspective all too often lost in news reports and government statements. Taken together, they remind us that, despite the playful good cheer, the human cost of war is far too high. A remarkable contribution to the understanding of war and its impact, and a powerful tribute to those undone by it.

Watership Down
Richard Adams
The story follows a warren of Berkshire rabbits fleeing the destruction of their home by a land developer. As they search for a safe haven, skirting danger at every turn, we become acquainted with the band and its compelling culture and mythos. Adams has crafted a touching, involving world in the dirt and scrub of the English countryside, complete with its own folk history and land.

Slaughterhouse Five
Kurt Vonnegut – (recommended for College English)
We are introduced to Billy Pilgrim a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the plant Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phrases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut’s) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden. Vonnegut’s book is as important as any written since 1945. Like Catch-22, it fashions the author’s experiences in the Second World War into an eloquent and deeply funny plea against butchery in the service of authority.

Beloved
Toni Morrison – (recommended for College English)
An unspeakable act of horror and heroism: a woman brutally kills her infant daughter rather than allow her to be enslaved. The woman is Sethe, and the novel traces her journey from slavery to freedom during and immediately following the Civil War. Woven into this circular, mesmerizing narrative are the horrible truths of Sethe’s past: the incredible cruelties she endured as a slave, and the hardships she suffered in her journey north to freedom. Just as Sethe finds the past too painful to remember, and the future just “a matter of keeping the past at bay,” her story is almost too painful to read. Yet Morrison manages to imbue the wreckage of her characters’ lives with compassion, humanity, and humor. Part ghost story, part history lesson, part folk tale, Beloved finds beauty in the unbearable, and lets us all see the enduring promise of hope that lies in anyone’s.


To Destroy You Is No Loss: The Odyssey of a Cambodian Family – NON-FICTION
Joan D. Criddle and Teeda Butt Mam (recommended for all levels)
A story of remarkable courage, fortitude and dignity in the face of adversity. TO DESTROY YOU IS NO LOSS follows one Cambodian family's struggle to survive four years of unprecedented brutality and wanton destruction during the Khmer Rouge regime. Featuring fifteen-year-old Teeda, it is the true story of the four generation Butt family's efforts to stay alive, and their eventual terror-filled escape attempts from a war-ravaged, famine-riddled nation.

I Am an American: The True Story of the Japanese Internment – NON-FICTION
Jerry Stanley – (recommended for all levels)
They were U.S. Citizens, many of them born in this country. Why were they being taken from their homes and sent to desolate places that were unlike anyplace they had ever lived?

10th GRADE Reading

Silver Kiss
Annette Klause
A novel of a young girl struggling to accept the impending death of her mother is curiously interwoven with her entanglement with a vampire.

Zack
William Bell
A boy goes on a journey in search of his roots. Zack is the son of an unlikely but happy marriage: his mother is a black blues singer and his father is a white Jewish college professor. Zack is resentful and bitter toward his parents for moving--in his last year of high school--from Toronto to a small college town in the country. He misses the excitement of the city, and things are rough at school.

Crashboomlove: A Novel in Verse
Juan Felipe Herrera
Portrait of Cesar Garcia, a 16-year-old Mexican teen growing up in the American high school.

Chasing Redbird
Sharon Creech
Contemporary adolescent with an independent spirit ties with special people in her life, and an interest in nature makes her way through life’s obstacles; as she clears a path through the Kentucky woods, she finds a way to herself.

Romiette and Julio
Sharon M. Draper
Romiette Cappelle, a black American girl, meets Julio Montague, a Hispanic boy from Texas, in a chat room. When they meet in person in the school cafeteria it is love at first sight. The similarity of their names with Shakespeare's heroes is not coincidence. Romiette and Julio's relationship attracts harassment by the school's gang. Things go from bad to worse when the couple and their friends try to expose the gang's illegal activities in order to persuade gang members to leave them alone.

Monster
Walter Dean Myers
Monster is what the prosecutor called 16-year-old Steve Harmon for his supposed role in the fatal shooting of a convenience-store owner. But was Steve really the lookout who gave the “all clear” to the murderer, or was he just in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Downriver
Will Hobbs
No adults, no permit, no river map. Just some "borrowed" gear from Discovery Unlimited, the outdoor education program Jessie and her new companions have just ditched. Jessie and the others are having the time of their lives floating beneath sheer red walls, exploring unknown caves and dangerous waterfalls, and plunging through the Grand Canyon's roaring rapids. No one, including Troy, who emerges as the group's magnetic and ultimately frightening leader, can foresee the challenges and conflicts.
What will be the consequences of their reckless adventure?

Whale Talk
Chris Crutcher
Crutcher’s gripping tale of small-town prejudice delivers a powerful message about social issues and ills and a darkly ironic appraisal of the high school sports arena.


When I Was Puerto Rican
Esmeralda Santiago
Many individuals who grew up in the barrios found life to be a struggle for survival. In Santiago's memoir, she recalls her own passage through childhood, when her mother moved her children from the humble dwelling they all shared in the country outside San Juan to a Brooklyn apartment adjoining the projects.

Almost a Woman
Esmeralda Santiago
The broad outlines of Santiago's life story, begun in When I Was Puerto Rican (1993) and continued here, are familiar; indeed, they portray the quintessential American experience--that of a stranger in a strange land.

The Killer Angels
Michael Shaara
Allows the reader to enter into the minds and hearts of the men who fought at Gettysburg; portrays idea that it is not armies who fight wars, but individuals; it is not theories of strategy which yield victory, but human insight and effort.

Their Eyes Were Watching God – (recommended for College English)
Zora Neale Hurston
Sympathetic portrayal of a young black woman’s struggles in central Florida in the early 1900s; a notable and historic example of black fiction and a powerful evocation of feminine self-actualization.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – (recommended for College English)
Maya Angelou
In a poetic, yet detached way, Maya Angelou captures the heart of her struggles growing up female and Black during the Depression. Her style and description draw in the reader and keep her spellbound even during the most painful scenes. You feel deeply for the author and her little brother as they drift through their lives living for a bit of affection. Neglected by their divorced parents, Maya and her brother get sent to Arkansas at ages 4 and 5 to live with their grandma and handicapped uncle. Although life is hard and love not demonstrated, Maya learns much from her grandma and uncle.

The theme of this book is the quest for the child to be loved by the adult. Maya feels inferior. She feels ugly and compares herself to her magical brother Bailey. Both children are starved for true affection and daydream a white movie actress on the screen is their long lost mother.

Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World: The Extraordinary True Story of Shackleton
and the Endurance – NON-FICTION
Jennifer Armstrong, Simon Boughton (Editor) – (recommended for all levels)
Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World vividly recreates one of the most extraordinary adventure stories in history.

In August 1914, Ernest Shackleton and 27 men sailed from England in an attempt to become the first team of explorers to cross the Antarctic continent from one side to the other. Five months later and still 100 miles from land, their ship, Endurance, became trapped. In this amazing survival story, Shackleton and five others navigated 800 miles of the treacherous open ocean in a 20-foot boat and then hiked across the unmapped, glacier-strewn interior of South Georgia Island to a whaling station. In August 1916, 19 months after Endurance first became icebound, Shackleton led a rescue party back to Elephant Island for his men.

9th GRADE Reading 

Children of the River
Linda Crew
Sundara fled Cambodia with her aunt's family to escape the Khmer Rouge Army when she was thirteen, leaving behind her parents, her brother and sister, and the boy she had loved since she was a child. Now, four years later, she struggles to fit in at her Oregon high school and to be "a good Cambodian girl" at home.

The First Part Last
Angela Johnson
Bobby is your classic urban teenaged boy -- impulsive, eager, restless. On his sixteenth birthday, he gets some news from his girlfriend, Nia, that changes his life forever. She's pregnant. Bobby's going to be a father. Suddenly things like school and house parties and hanging with friends no longer seem important as they're replaced by visits to Nia's obstetrician and a social worker who says that the only way for Nia and Bobby to lead a normal life is to put their baby up for adoption.

With powerful language and keen insight, Johnson looks at the male side of teen pregnancy as she delves into one young man's struggle to figure out what "the right thing" is and then to do it. No matter what the cost.

Miracle’s Boys
Jacqueline Woodson
Three brothers who struggle to survive after the death of their mother to diabetes and father to hypothermia. The Bailey brothers face many obstacles and find their hopes and dreams sometimes unreachable. These three NYC street smart teenagers’ relationship changes as does their family bond.

Among the Hidden
Margaret Peterson Haddix
In a society where family size is strictly limited to two children, Luke is a third child. Living in an attic bedroom to avoid being seen by authorities, Luke peers through an outside vent and observes another ""shadow child"" hiding in a nearby home, thereby beginning a secret friendship with Jen, who plans to rebel against the government system.

Hush
Jacqueline Woodson
Contemporary fiction. Thirteen-year old Toswiah must leave her town, her friends, even her name behind to begin a new life when her father exposes a crime committed by his fellow police officers.

Quinceanera Means Sweet Fifteen
Veronica Chambers
For Marisol, planning a quinceañera is more like a daydream since she and her single mother have little to spend on an extravagant party. Magda drops their friendship when she takes up with new friends who shoplift and find Marisol uncool. Chambers uses the quinceañera and family traditions to introduce Latin American heritage and the concept of community

The Young Man and the Sea
Rodman Philbrick
12 year old Skiff tries to earn money for his family after his dad dies and takes a dangerous trip to Maine to catch a monster blue-fin tuna.

Shakespeare Bats Clean-Up
Ron Koertge
A 14 year old baseball player is sidelined with mononucleosis, and learns life lessons through poetry.

The Teacher’s Funeral
Richard Peck
Humorous tale of 15 year old Russell who dreams of becoming a trainer of harvesters. However, at school his teacher dies and his sister takes over, which begin his worst nightmare.

Travel Team
Mike Lupica
12 year old Danny is not chosen for the basketball team. He later forms a team with other castoffs. Do they have a chance of winning?

The Breadwinner
Deborah Ellis
Imagine living in a country in which women and girls are not allowed to leave the house without a man. Imagine having to wear clothes that cover every part of your body, including your face, whenever you go out. This is life in Afghanistan, where the Taliban, members of an extreme religious group, run most of the country. (RL 5; IL 5-8)

Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss and What I Learned
Judd Winick
In this moving story about tolerance, the author recounts his friendship with Pedro Zamora, an HIV-positive AIDS activist and former star of MTV’s The Real World.

The Legend of Bass Reeves
Gary Paulsen
Born into slavery, Bass Reeves became the most successful US Marshal of the Wild West.

Many "heroic lawmen" of the Wild West, familiar to us through television and film, were actually violent scoundrels and outlaws themselves. But of all the sheriffs of the frontier, one man stands out as a true hero: Bass Reeves.

He was a black man, born into slavery. And though the laws of his country enslaved him and his mother, when he became a free man he served the law, with such courage and honor that he became a legend.

Dicey’s Song
Cynthia Voigt
Realistic portrayal of the adolescent search for identify and independence within a family; learning when to reach out and when to let go; dealing with death; growing up.

All for the Better: A Story of El Barrio (Stories of America)
Nicholas Mohr, Rudy Gutierrez (Illustrator)
All for the Better tells the story of how one caring person can make a difference. In 1933, the Great Depression had hit Puerto Rico hard as it had hit the United States. Evelina Lopez, then 11, left her mother and sisters to live with an aunt in New York City. Her journey to Spanish Harlem, El Barrio, and the life that followed there make up this simple biography.

Laughing Boy
Oliver La Farge
The Pulitzer Prize winning novel of Laughing Boy and Slim Girl, two young Navajos struggling to maintain their heritage.

The Learning Tree
Gordon Parks
A powerfully and sensitively written story of a thirteen-year-old black boy.

Imitate the Tiger
Jan Cheripko
Chris Serbo looks for salvation in football and drinking, but neither will fill the emptiness inside. Not until he finds himself in danger on a lonely road does he come face-to-face with the person he has become.

Falling Leaves
Yen Mah
Adeline Yen Mah, the youngest daughter of an affluent Chinese family endured a childhood of appalling emotional abuse. Her struggles reveal the harsh realities of growing up female in twentieth-century China.

Black Like Me
John Griffin – (recommended for College English)
In the deep south of the 1950s, journalist John Griffin decided to cross the color line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man. His audacious, still chillingly relevant eyewitness history is a work about race and humanity – that in this new millennium still has something important to say to every American.

The House of Seven Gables
Nathaniel Hawthorne – (recommended for College English)
A darkly tragic novel about a wealthy and hypocritical judge and the misfortunes he causes.

The Last of the Mohicans
James Fenimore Cooper – (recommended for College English)
Cooper’s most famous novel concerning the desperate struggle of the Native Americans against the pressures and restrictions of white civilization.

Greatest: Muhammad Ali – NON-FICTION
Walter Dean Myers – (recommended for all levels)
Myers carefully crafts Ali's tale from his Clay family roots in Louisville, Kentucky, to his struggles today with Parkinson Disease. Myers weaves the events of Ali's personal life with those occurring in our country during the twentieth century.

Secrets of a Civil War Submarine: Solving the Mysteries of the H.L. Hunley – NON-FICTION
Sally W. Walker – (recommended for all levels)
This view of the Civil War attempts to solve the mysteries of H.L. Hurley.

Book Report Forms

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Greater Lowell Technical High School does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation. Please contact Mr. Emmanuel Manolopoulos, Title IX / Section 504 Coordinator at 978.441.4955 or mmanolopoulos@gltech.org for information.