9th Grade Independent Novel Suggested Reading List
Lexile 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 prepschoolin 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 impaledon 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 Streetis 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 Dyingis 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 Dyingis 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 Seais 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 Treesis 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 Japaneseancestryduring 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 Yorkand 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 WhereWhite 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 Ántoniatells 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'sSiddharthais the story of a young Brahmin's quest for the ultimate reality. Steeped in the tenets of both psychoanalysis and Eastern mysticism, Siddharthapresents 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 thenation's #1 hit: "Don't Fence Me In."
Farewell to Manzanaris 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 publishedLook 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 thatLook Homeward, Angelis "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. *