9th Grade Independent Novel Suggested Reading ListLexile Level 700-790

Title: As Easy as Falling off the Face of the Earth

Author: Lynne Rae Perkins

Lexile: 730

A teenaged boy encounters one comedic calamity

after another when his train strands him in the

middle of nowhere, and everything comes down to

luck. **

Title: The Warrior Heir

Author: Cinda Williams Chima

Lexile: 730

After learning about his magical ancestry and his

own warrior powers, sixteen-year-old Jack

embarks on a training program to fight enemy

wizards. **

Title: Hattie Big Sky

Author: Kirby Larson

Lexile: 700

Alone in the world, teen-aged Hattie is driven to

prove up on her uncle's homesteading claim. **

Title: A Northern Light

Author:

Jennifer Donnelly

Lexile: 700

In 1906, Mattie takes a job at an inn where she

discovers the truth about the death of a guest. **

Title: Catcher in the Rye

Author: J.D. Salinger

Lexile: 790

The hero-narrator of THE CATCHER IN THE RYE is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. *

Lexile Level 800-890

Title: Bless Me Ultima

Author: Rudy Anaya

Lexile: 840

Stories filled with wonder and the haunting beauty of his culture have helped make Rudolfo Anaya the father of Chicano literature in English, and his tales fairly shimmer with the lyric richness of his prose. Acclaimed in both Spanish and English, Anaya is perhaps best loved for his classic bestseller ... Antonio Marez is six years old when Ultima comes to stay with his family in New Mexico. She is a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic. Under her wise wing, Tony will test the bonds that tie him to his people, and discover himself in the pagan past, in his father's wisdom, and in his mother's Catholicism. And at each life turn there is Ultima, who delivered Tony into the world-and will nurture the birth of his soul. *

Title: When Legends Die

Author: Hall Borlund

Lexile: 850

When his father killed another brave, Thomas Black Bull and his parents sought refuge in the wilderness. There they took up life as it had been in the old days, hunting and fishing, battling for survival. But an accident claimed the father's life and the grieving mother died shortly afterward. Left alone, the young Indian boy vowed never to return to the white man's world, to the alien laws that had condemned his father. *

Title: The House on Mango Street

Author: Sandra Cisneros

Lexile: 870

The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero. Told in a series of vignettes – sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous – it is the story of a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers.*

Title: As I Lay Dying

Author: William Faulkner

Lexile: 870

As I Lay Dying is Faulkner’s harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Narrated in turn  by each of the family members—including Addie herself—as well as others the novel ranges in mood, from dark comedy to the deepest pathos. Considered one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama, As I Lay Dying is a true 20th-century classic.*

Title: Cry, the Beloved Country

Author: Alan Paton

Lexile: 860

"Cry, the Beloved Country" is a beautifully told and profoundly compassionate story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set in the troubled and changing South Africa of the 1940s.

The book is written with such keen empathy and understanding that to read it is to share fully in the gravity of the characters' situations. It both touches your heart deeply and inspires a renewed faith in the dignity of mankind. "Cry, the Beloved Country" is a classic tale, passionately African, timeless and universal, and beyond all, selfless.*

 

Title: Dragon and Thief

Author: Timothy Zahn

Lexile: 800

When a spaceship crashes near Jack's hiding place,

with one survivor, his life is changed forever. **

Title: Everlost

Author: Neal Shusterman

Lexile: 860

When Nick and Allie are killed in a car crash, they

end up in Everlost, or limbo for lost souls, where

although Nick is satisfied, Allie will stop at nothing--

even skinjacking--to break free. **

Title: Toads and Diamonds

Author: Heather Tomlinson

Lexile: 820

A retelling of the Perrault fairy tale set in pre-colonial

India, in which two stepsisters receive gifts from a

goddess and each walks her own path to find her

gift's purpose, discovering **

Title: The Traitors` Gate

Author: Avi

Lexile: 810

When his father is arrested as a debtor in 1849

London, fourteen-year-old John Huffam must take on

unexpected responsibilities, from asking a distant

relative for help to determining why people are

spying on him and his family. **

Title: Trash

Author: Andy Mulligan

Lexile: 860

Fourteen-year-olds Raphael and Gardo team up with

a younger boy, Rat, to figure out the mysteries

surrounding a bag Raphael finds during their daily

life of sorting through trash in a third-world country's

dump. **

Lexile Level 900-990

Title: Old Man and the Sea

Author: Ernest Hemingway

Lexile: 940

The Old Man and the Sea is one of Hemingway's most enduring works. Told in language of great simplicity and power, it is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal -- a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. *

Title: I am David

Author: Ann Holm

Lexile: 980

David's entire twelve-year life has been spent in a grisly prison camp in Eastern Europe. He knows nothing of the outside world. But when he is given the chance to escape, he seizes it. With his vengeful enemies hot on his heels, David struggles to cope in this strange new world, where his only resources are a compass, a few crusts of bread, his two aching feet, and some vague advice to seek refuge in Denmark. Is that enough to survive?David's extraordinary odyssey is dramatically chronicled in Anne Holm's classic about the meaning of freedom and the power of hope.*

Title: The Bean Trees

Author: Barbara Kingsolver

Lexile: 900

The Bean Trees is bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver’s first novel, now widely regarded as a modern classic. It is the charming, engrossing tale of rural Kentucky native Taylor Greer, who only wants to get away from her roots and avoid getting pregnant. She succeeds, but inherits a 3-year-old native-American little girl named Turtle along the way, and together, from Oklahoma to Tucson, Arizona, half-Cherokee Taylor and her charge search for a new life in the West. *

Title: Obasan

Author: Joy Kogawa

Lexile: 990

Based on the author's own experiences, this award-winning novel was the first to tell the story of the evacuation, relocation, and dispersal of Canadian citizens of Japanese ancestry during the Second World War. *

Title: Pigman

Author: Paul Zindel

Lexile: 950

When sophomores John and Lorraine played a practical joke a few months ago on a stranger named Angelo Pignati, they had no idea what they were starting. Virtually overnight, almost against their will, the two befriended the lonely old man; it wasn't long before they were more comfortable in his house than their own. But now Mr. Pignati is dead. And for John and Lorraine, the only way to find peace is to write down their friend's story -- the story of the Pigman. *

Title: The Invisible Man

Author: Ralph Ellison

Lexile: 950

The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.  *

Title: The Chosen

Author: Chaim Potok

Lexile: 970

It is the now-classic story of two fathers and two sons and the pressures on all of them to pursue the religion they share in the way that is best suited to each. And as the boys grow into young men, they discover in the other a lost spiritual brother, and a link to an unexplored world that neither had ever

considered before. In effect, they exchange places, and find the peace that neither will ever retreat from again. *

Title: Picture Bride

Author: Yoshiko Ushida

Lexile: 970

Carrying a photograph of the man she is to marry but has yet to meet, young Hana Omiya arrives in San Francisco, California, in 1917, one of several hundred Japanese "picture brides" whose arranged marriages brought them to America in the early 1900s.

Her story is intertwined with others: her husband, Taro Takeda, an Oakland shopkeeper; Kiku and her husband Henry, who reject demeaning city work to become farmers; Dr. Kaneda, a respected community leader who is destroyed by the adopted land he loves. All are caught up in the cruel turmoil of World War II, when West Coast Japanese Americans are uprooted from their homes and imprisoned in desert detention camps. Although tragedy strikes each of them, the same strength that brought her to America enables Hana to survive. *

Title: Blood Red Horse

Author: K. M. Grant

Lexile: 930

Two brothers are called by King Richard to fight in

the Crusades. They are bound together by a special

horse and a girl they both love. **

Title: Chasing Lincoln`s Killer

Author: James L. Swanson

Lexile: 980

Recounts the escape of John Wilkes Booth, Abraham

Lincoln's assassin, and follows the intensive twelve-

day search for him and his accomplices. **

Title: Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an

Unwanted Daughter

Author: Adeline Yen Mah

Lexile: 960

Yen Mah is only an infant when her father remarries

after her mother's death. As the youngest of her five

siblings, Wu Mei suffers the worst at the hands of her

stepmother Niang. **

Title: The Legend of Bass Reeves

Author: Gary Paulsen

Lexile: 950

An account of the life of Bass Reeves, federal

marshal. **

Title: Paper Covers Rock

Author: Jenny Hubbard

Lexile: 920

At the beginning of his junior year at a boys'

boarding school, 16-year-old Alex is devastated when

he fails to save a drowning friend. **

Lexile Level 1000-1090

Title: I Know why the Caged Bird Sings

Author: Maya Angelou

Lexile: 1070

Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age–and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns about love for herself and the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors (“I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare”) will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned. *

Title: Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee

Author: Dee Brown

Lexile: 1080

Dee Brown's eloquent, meticulously documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian became a publishing phenomenon when first published in 1970. Now in paperback, this stunningly illustrated edition showcases more than 300 images, including maps, drawings, paintings, portraits, and photographs of notable sites and sacred battlefields. Excerpts from such acclaimed books as Where White Men Fear to Tread, along with

essays by notable historians and Native American leaders like Joseph Marshall III, enhance the original text.*

Title: My Antonia

Author: Willa Cather

Lexile: 1010

Set on the Nebraska prairie of the 1880s, My Ántonia tells the story of Ántonia Shimerda, daughter of a Bohemian immigrant. Through the eyes of Jim Burden, her tutor and admirer, we follow Ántonia's struggles and triumphs in the face of life's relentless hardships.*

Title: The Plague

Author: Albert Camus

Lexile: 1070

A haunting tale of human resilience in the face of unrelieved horror, Camus' novel about a bubonic plague ravaging the people of a North African coastal town is a classic of twentieth-century literature. *

Title: Siddhartha

Author: Herman Hesse

Lexile: 1010

With parallels to the enlightenment of the Buddha, Hesse's Siddhartha is the story of a young Brahmin's quest for the ultimate reality. Steeped in the tenets of both psychoanalysis and Eastern mysticism, Siddhartha presents an original view of man and culture, and the arduous process of self-discovery that leads to reconciliation, harmony, and peace. *

Title: Once and Future King

Author: T.H. White

Lexile: 1080

T.H. White's masterful retelling of the saga of King Arthur is a fantasy classic as legendary as Excalibur and Camelot, and a poignant story of adventure, romance, and magic that has enchanted readers for generations. *

Title: Farewell to Manzanar

Author: Jeanne Wakatsuki

Lexile: 1040

Jeanne Wakatsuki was seven years old in 1942 when her family was uprooted from their home and sent to live at Manzanar internment camp--with 10,000 other Japanese Americans. Along with searchlight towers and armed guards, Manzanar ludicrously featured cheerleaders, Boy Scouts, sock hops, baton twirling lessons and a dance band called the Jive Bombers who would play any popular song except the  nation's #1 hit: "Don't Fence Me In."

Farewell to Manzanar is the true story of one spirited Japanese-American family's attempt to survive the indignities of forced detention . . . and of a native-born American child who discovered what it was like to grow up behind barbed wire in the United States. *

Title: To the Lighthouse

Author: Virginia Woolf

Lexile: 1030

Every summer, the Ramsays visit their summer home on the beautiful Isle of Skye, surrounded by the excitement and chatter of family and friends, mirroring Virginia Woolf’s own joyful holidays of her youth. But as time passes, and in its wake the First World War, the transience of life becomes ever more apparent through the vignette of the thoughts and observations of the novel’s disparate cast. *

Title: Look Homeward, Angel

Author: Thomas Wolfe

Lexile: 1010

Thomas Wolfe published Look Homeward, Angel, his first novel, about a young man's burning desire to leave his small town and tumultuous family in search of a better life, in 1929. It gave the world proof of his genius and launched a powerful legacy.

The novel follows the trajectory of Eugene Gant, a brilliant and restless young man whose wanderlust and passion shape his adolescent years in rural North Carolina. Wolfe said that Look Homeward, Angel is "a book made out of my life," and his largely autobiographical story about the quest for a greater intellectual life has resonated with and influenced generations of readers, including some of today's most important novelists. Rich with lyrical prose and vivid characterizations, this twentieth-century American classic will capture the hearts and imaginations of every reader. *

Title: The Return of the Native

Author: Thomas Hardy

Lexile: 1040

Eustacia Vye criss-crosses the wild Egdon Heath, eager to experience life to the full in her quest for 'music, poetry, passion, war'. She marries Clym Yeobright, native of the heath, but his idealism frustrates her romantic ambitions and her discontent draws others into a tangled web of deceit and unhappiness.*

Lexile Level 1100-1190

Title: Mists of Avalon

Author: Marion Zimmer Bradley

Lexile: 1120

Here is the magical legend of King Arthur, vividly retold through the eyes and lives of the women who wielded power from behind the throne. A spellbinding novel, an extraordinary literary achievement, THE MISTS OF AVALON will stay with you for a long time to come. *

Title: The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Author: Alex Haley

Lexile: 1120

From hustling, drug addiction and armed violence in America's black ghettos Malcolm X turned, in a dramatic prison conversion, to the puritanical fervor of the Black Muslims. As their spokesman he became identified in the white press as a terrifying teacher of race hatred; but to his direct audience, the oppressed American blacks, he brought hope and self-respect. *

Title: Simarillion

Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

Lexile: 1150

The story of the creation of the world and of the First Age, this is the ancient drama to which the characters in THE LORD OF THE RINGS look back and in whose events some of them, such as Elrond and Galadriel, took part. The three Silmarils were jewels created by Feanor, most gifted of the Elves. Within them was imprisoned the Light of the Two Trees of Valinor before the Trees themselves were destroyed by Morgoth, the first Dark Lord. Thereafter, the unsullied Light of Valinor lived on only in the Silmarils, but they were seized by Morgoth and set in his crown, which was guarded in the impenetrable fortress of Angband in the north of Middle-earth. THE SILMARILLION is the history of the rebellion of Feanor and his kindred against the gods, their exile from Valinor and return to Middle-earth, and their war, hopeless despite all their heroism, against the great Enemy. *

Title: Ethan Frome

Author: Edith Wharton

Lexile: 1160

Tragic story of wasted lives, set against a bleak New England background. A poverty-stricken New England farmer, his ailing wife and a youthful housekeeper are drawn relentlessly into a deep-rooted domestic struggle in this hauntingly grim tale of thwarted love. Considered by many to be Wharton's masterpiece. *

Title: Winterdance

Author: Gary Paulsen

Lexile: 1140

Paulsen and his team of dogs endured snowstorms, frostbite, dogfights, moose attacks, sleeplessness, and hallucinations in the relentless push to go on. *

* Description from Amazon.com

**Description from Weber County Library http://www.weberpl.lib.ut.us/content/booklists/sort/t/47