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
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. **
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. *
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. *
Lexile Level 800-890
Title: Bless Me Ultima
Title: The House on Mango Street
Author:
Author: Sandra Cisneros
Rudy Anaya
Lexile: 840
Lexile: 870
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. *
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
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.*
Author: Timothy Zahn
Lexile: 800
When a spaceship crashes near Jack's hiding place,
with one survivor, his life is changed forever. **
Title: Cry, the Beloved Country
Author: Alan Paton
Lexile: 860
Title: Everlost
"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.
Author: Neal Shusterman
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.*
When Nick and Allie are killed in a car crash, they
Lexile: 860
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: 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: The Traitors` Gate
Author: Avi
Title: Old Man and the Sea
Lexile: 810
Author: Ernest Hemingway
When his father is arrested as a debtor in 1849
Lexile: 940
London, fourteen-year-old John Huffam must take on
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. *
unexpected responsibilities, from asking a distant
relative for help to determining why people are
spying on him and his family. **
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
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.*
Based on the author's own experiences, this awardwinning 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
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. *
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: 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: 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: 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
Title: Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an
Unwanted Daughter
Author: Adeline Yen Mah
Lexile: 960
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. **
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, selfsufficient 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. *
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
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.*
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: 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 nativeborn 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
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: 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. *
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
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.
Title: Mists of Avalon
Author: Marion Zimmer Bradley
Lexile: 1120
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. *
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
Title: The Return of the Native
Lexile: 1120
Author: Thomas Hardy
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. *
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.*
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
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 deeprooted domestic struggle in this hauntingly grim tale
of thwarted love. Considered by many to be
Wharton's masterpiece. *
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