Grade 11-What is This Book About?

Book Summaries

The Greatest: Muhammad Ali

Walter Dean Myers

An award-winning author presents a riveting account of the extraordinary career and accomplishments of boxer Muhammad Ali. This biography chronicles Ali's impact on race relations inside and outside the sports world.

I Have Lived a Thousand Years

Livia Bitton-Jackson

A memoir of Elli Friedmann in which she tells about her experiences at Auschwitz concentration camp where she was taken at the age of thirteen in 1944 when the Nazis invaded her native Hungary.

Fangirl

Ken Baker

Freshman songwriting loner Josie Brant and famous rocker Peter Max are brought together after Josie's friend's betrayal.

Bleachers

John Grisham

Presents a novel about high school football in a small Texas town, a place in which football has become a religion.

On the Come Up

Angie Thomas

"Sixteen-year-old Bri hopes to become a great rapper, and after her first song goes viral for all the wrong reasons, must decide whether to sell out or face eviction with her widowed mother.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Jamie Ford

Henry Lee, a Chinese-American in Seattle, loses his wife to cancer and recalls his youth, when he and his Japanese-American friend, Keiko, spent time together during WWII--before Keiko and her family were interred at a camp--and deals with generational difficulties between himself and his father and college-age son.

Tell Me Three Things

Julie Buxbaum

Sixteen-year old Jessie, still grieving over her mother's death, must move from Chicago to "The Valley," with a new stepfamily but no new friends until an anonymous fellow student emails and offers to help her navigate the school's treacherous social waters.

A Separate Peace

John Knowles

An American classic and great bestseller for over thirty years, A Separate Peace is timeless in its description of adolescence during a period when the entire country was losing its innocence to World War II. Gene Forrester looks back fifteen years to a World War II year in which he and his best friend Phineas were roommates in a New Hampshire boarding school. Their friendship is marred by Finny's crippling fall, an event for which Gene is responsible and one that eventually leads to tragedy.