9th Grade Independent Novel Suggested Reading List

Lexile Level 700-790

Title: Hattie Big Sky

Author: Kirby Larson

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

Lexile: 700
Author: Lynne Rae Perkins

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

Lexile: 730
prove up on her uncle's homesteading claim. **

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: A Northern Light

Author:

Jennifer Donnelly

Title: The Warrior Heir

Lexile: 700

Author: Cinda Williams Chima

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

Lexile: 730 discovers the truth about the death of a guest. **

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: 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
Title: Dragon and Thief
Author: William Faulkner

Author: Timothy Zahn

Lexile: 870

As I Lay Dying is Faulkner’s harrowing account of the Lexile: 800

Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi
countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother.
Narrated in turn by each of the family members— When a spaceship crashes near Jack's hiding place,
including Addie herself—as well as others the novel with one survivor, his life is changed forever. **
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

Title: Everlost
Lexile: 860

"Cry, the Beloved Country" is a beautifully told and Author: Neal Shusterman
profoundly compassionate story of the Zulu pastor
Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set in the
troubled and changing South Africa of the 1940s. Lexile: 860

The book is written with such keen empathy and When Nick and Allie are killed in a car crash, they
understanding that to read it is to share fully in the
gravity of the characters' situations. It both touches end up in Everlost, or limbo for lost souls, where
your heart deeply and inspires a renewed faith in the
dignity of mankind. "Cry, the Beloved Country" is a although Nick is satisfied, Allie will stop at nothing--
classic tale, passionately African, timeless and
universal, and beyond all, selfless.* 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 Title: Obasan

Author: Ann Holm Author: Joy Kogawa

Lexile: 980 Lexile: 990

David's entire twelve-year life has been spent in a Based on the author's own experiences, this award-
grisly prison camp in Eastern Europe. He knows winning novel was the first to tell the story of the
nothing of the outside world. But when he is given evacuation, relocation, and dispersal of Canadian
the chance to escape, he seizes it. With his vengeful citizens of Japanese ancestry during the Second
enemies hot on his heels, David struggles to cope in World War. *
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: 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
Title: The Bean Trees
before they were more comfortable in his house than
Author: Barbara Kingsolver their own. But now Mr. Pignati is dead. And for John
and Lorraine, the only way to find peace is to write
Lexile: 900 down their friend's story -- the story of the Pigman.
*

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: 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 Title: The Legend of Bass Reeves

Author: James L. Swanson Author: Gary Paulsen

Lexile: 980 Lexile: 950

Recounts the escape of John Wilkes Booth, Abraham An account of the life of Bass Reeves, federal

Lincoln's assassin, and follows the intensive twelve- marshal. **

day search for him and his accomplices. **

Title: Paper Covers Rock

Author: Jenny Hubbard

Title: Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an

Unwanted Daughter
Lexile: 920

Author: Adeline Yen Mah

At the beginning of his junior year at a boys'

boarding school, 16-year-old Alex is devastated

Lexile: 960
when he fails to save a drowning friend. **
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. **
Lexile Level 1000-1090

Title: I Know why the Caged Bird Sings Title: My Antonia

Author: Maya Angelou Author: Willa Cather

Lexile: 1070 Lexile: 1010

Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self- Set on the Nebraska prairie of the 1880s, My
sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Ántonia tells the story of Ántonia Shimerda, daughter
Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of of a Bohemian immigrant. Through the eyes of Jim
abandonment and the prejudice of the local Burden, her tutor and admirer, we follow Ántonia's
“powhitetrash.” At eight years old and back at her struggles and triumphs in the face of life's relentless
mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a hardships.*
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: The Plague

Author: Albert Camus

Lexile: 1070

Title: Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee A haunting tale of human resilience in the face of
unrelieved horror, Camus' novel about a bubonic
Author: Dee Brown plague ravaging the people of a North African coastal
town is a classic of twentieth-century literature. *
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: Farewell to Manzanar
Title: Siddhartha

Author: Jeanne Wakatsuki

Author: Herman Hesse

Lexile: 1040
Lexile: 1010

Jeanne Wakatsuki was seven years old in 1942 when

With parallels to the enlightenment of the Buddha,
her family was uprooted from their home and sent to
Hesse's Siddhartha is the story of a young Brahmin's
live at Manzanar internment camp--with 10,000
quest for the ultimate reality. Steeped in the tenets
other Japanese Americans. Along with searchlight
of both psychoanalysis and Eastern mysticism,
towers and armed guards, Manzanar ludicrously
Siddhartha presents an original view of man and
featured cheerleaders, Boy Scouts, sock hops, baton
culture, and the arduous process of self-discovery
twirling lessons and a dance band called the Jive
that leads to reconciliation, harmony, and peace. *
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: Once and Future King

Author: T.H. White

Lexile: 1080

T.H. White's masterful retelling of the saga of King

Title: To the Lighthouse
Arthur is a fantasy classic as legendary as Excalibur
and Camelot, and a poignant story of adventure,
Author: Virginia Woolf
romance, and magic that has enchanted readers for
generations. *
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. *
 Lexile Level 1100-1190

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 Title: Mists of Avalon
leave his small town and tumultuous family in search
of a better life, in 1929. It gave the world proof of Author: Marion Zimmer Bradley
his genius and launched a powerful legacy.
Lexile: 1120
The novel follows the trajectory of Eugene Gant, a
brilliant and restless young man whose wanderlust Here is the magical legend of King Arthur, vividly
and passion shape his adolescent years in rural retold through the eyes and lives of the women who
North Carolina. Wolfe said that Look Homeward, wielded power from behind the throne. A
Angel is "a book made out of my life," and his largely
spellbinding novel, an extraordinary literary
autobiographical story about the quest for a greater
intellectual life has resonated with and influenced achievement, THE MISTS OF AVALON will stay with
generations of readers, including some of today's you for a long time to come. *
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 Autobiography of Malcolm X

Author: Alex Haley

Title: The Return of the Native Lexile: 1120

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.*
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
Title: Winterdance
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien
Author: Gary Paulsen
Lexile: 1150
Lexile: 1140
The story of the creation of the world and of the First
Age, this is the ancient drama to which the Paulsen and his team of dogs endured snowstorms,
characters in THE LORD OF THE RINGS look back frostbite, dogfights, moose attacks, sleeplessness,
and in whose events some of them, such as Elrond and hallucinations in the relentless push to go on. *
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 * Description from Amazon.com
destroyed by Morgoth, the first Dark Lord.
Thereafter, the unsullied Light of Valinor lived on
**Description from Weber County Library
only in the Silmarils, but they were seized by
Morgoth and set in his crown, which was guarded in http://www.weberpl.lib.ut.us/content/booklists
the impenetrable fortress of Angband in the north of
Middle-earth. THE SILMARILLION is the history of the /sort/t/47
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. *