Summer Reading 2013
Pre-AP English II
Mrs. Johnson
To Parents and Students:
Before You Begin:
The 2013 Pre-AP English II Summer Reading assignment strives to present Common Core
readiness and Advanced Placement readiness selections to college minded serious students.
My goal is to encourage students to choose books both appropriate for and interesting to them,
to read for pleasure, and to demonstrate their reading comprehension at a high level of thinking.
The lists consist of titles from past and current Advanced Placement English Literature and
Language test, some current winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature plus a few Common Core
Exemplar texts. The selections come also from Latin American authors, some from the United
States and some from other countries. Some titles may contain content that is mature in nature
or that may be objectionable to some families. I recommend using resources such as the
Cushing Public Library or accessing reviews on websites such as Amazon.com to make
informed decisions when selecting specific books.
What To Do:
Students will need to choose a title and read the book before school starts. Students also need
to complete all parts of the assignment, which will be due the fifth day of class and which will be
a 150 -point grade. I recommend that students give themselves plenty of time – at least a week
for most students – to read their chosen book and complete their assignment so they are
prepared for a successful beginning to the new school year. Happy reading!
***IMPORTANT!***
Please be aware that Part 2 of the assignment will be used to develop an informational essay,
during the first instructional unit in class, so diligent completion of the summer reading and
accompanying assignment is imperative to a student’s success at the beginning of the year. To
focus on important ideas to write the informational essay, record your answers to the following
questions as you read and as you pick quotes for Part 2 of the assignment:
 Summarize the plot (without giving away the ending). Was the book easy to follow?
 How thoroughly were the characters developed? Did they change in any meaningful way
or learn something about life over the course of the book?
 What images or events did you consider most memorable about the book?
 Who is the specific intended audience of this book? Why did the author choose to write
about this particular subject?
 What stylistic choices did the author make? (Ex: Written in verse, Started with a
flashback, Had different characters tell their different perspectives, etc.)
 What is the main idea or theme of the book? What makes it good, different, or
groundbreaking?
 What was your favorite part of the book? Your least favorite?
 Is there a one common statement the text seems to be making about love (if
applicable)?
 Is there a common image repeated throughout the novel as a metaphor? Does it work as
an appropriate metaphor?
 What is the relationship between the literal and the metaphoric in this text?
 Does the reader need to suspend his or her notions of reality to accept the device of
magical realism of the text (if applicable)?
Summer Reading 2013
Pre-AP English II
Mrs. Johnson
In addition, you will need to define these terms some of them are literary and some are
rhetorical:
As it relates to literature
Extended metaphor
First-person point of view
Foreshadowing
Imagery
Irony
Magical realism
Metaphor
Paradox
Rhetoric
Symbolism
Theme
Third-person omniscience
As it relates to rhetoric
Persona
Intension
Genre
Subject
Audience
Context
Pre-AP English II Select and read one title
Selections may be substituted with other works (full length) by one of the authors (not
translators) of the selections described below. The intention is for students to read a literary or
critically acclaimed book by a Latin American author. Many of the titles or authors have
appeared on AP English (Literature or Language) exams. Summaries used come from
Amazon.com.
Fiction Titles
House of Spirits (Isabel Allende and Magda Bogin)
In one of the most important and beloved Latin American works of the twentieth century, Isabel Allende
weaves a luminous tapestry of three generations of the Trueba family, revealing both triumphs and
tragedies. Here is patriarch Esteban, whose wild desires and political machinations are tempered only by
his love for his ethereal wife, Clara, a woman touched by an otherworldly hand. Their daughter, Blanca,
whose forbidden love for a man Esteban has deemed unworthy infuriates her father, yet will produce his
greatest joy: his granddaughter Alba, a beautiful, ambitious girl who will lead the family and their country
into a revolutionary future.
The Stories of Eva Luna (Isabel Allende)
Born in Chile but now living in Northern California, Allende is the first female Latin American novelist to
become well-known to the American reading public. Her novels-- The House of the Spirits (4/15/85), Of
Love and Shadows (5/1/87), and Eva Luna (10/15/88)--are frequently compared to those of Gabriel
Garcia Marquez. The title character of the third book narrates the 24 stories in this collection, which,
though scattered with familiar names, places, and images, is an independent work, not a sequel. Allende
employs the techniques of Latin American magical realism to create a vivid world full of humor, passion,
pathos, and color.
Summer Reading 2013
Pre-AP English II
Mrs. Johnson
The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution (Mariano Azuela and Sergio Waisman,
trans.)
The Underdogs is the first great novel about the first great revolution of the twentieth century. Demetrio
Macias, a poor, illiterate Indian, must join the rebels to save his family. Courageous and charismatic, he
earns a generalship in Pancho Villa’s army, only to become discouraged with the cause after it becomes
hopelessly factionalized. At once a spare, moving depiction of the limits of political idealism, an authentic
representation of Mexico’s peasant life, and a timeless portrait of revolution, The Underdogs is an iconic
novel of the Latin American experience and a powerful novel about the disillusionment of war.
The Book of Lamentations (Rosario Castellanos)
A classic of Mexican literature since its publication in 1962, this historical epic appears in its first English
translation with fortuitous timing. It takes place in the impoverished southern Mexican state of Chiapas,
where, since 1994, Mayan rebels known as the Zapatistas have won sympathetic media attention for their
grievances against the Mexican government. Castellanos (1925-1974) takes events that occurred in 1712
and 1868 and resets them in the 1930s to create a complex tale of race, class and gender. Constructing
an entire provincial society, she portrays macho landowners, exploited Indians, submissive wives,
misguided politicians and corrupt religious officials clashing with one another and among themselves in a
thirst for power. At the center of the landowners' elite circle is political aspirant Leonardo Cifuentes, who
incites fear and hatred of the Indians, claiming they pollute the region's civic, moral and religious values.
The indigenous community, long abused by the landowners, revolves around Catalina, an ilol, or prophet,
who instigates a rebellion when she creates a cult around three stone idols. The major confrontation
occurs at Easter, when indigenos crucify a boy conceived in a rape of a young Indian girl by Cifuentes
years before. The novel features intriguing interior monologues and indirect discourse, but the thirdperson omniscient narration doesn't quite unite the many characters and plot lines or satisfactorily
compress the immense volume of historical detail into digestible form. Still, this is an always panoramic
and often moving novel that brings Mexico's turmoil to complex, tragic life. (Dec.) FYI: In 1974,
Castellanos was electrocuted while trying to plug in a lamp in Israel, where she served as Mexico's
ambassador.
Like Water for Chocolate (Laura Esquivel and Thomas Christensen, trans.)
Earthy, magical, and utterly charming, this tale of family life in turn-of-the-century Mexico became a bestselling phenomenon with its winning blend of poignant romance and bittersweet wit. The classic love story
takes place on the De la Garza ranch, as the tyrannical owner, Mama Elena, chops onions at the kitchen
table in her final days of pregnancy. While still in her mother's womb, her daughter to be weeps so
violently she causes an early labor, and little Tita slips out amid the spices and fixings for noodle soup.
This early encounter with food soon becomes a way of life, and Tita grows up to be a master chef. She
shares special points of her favorite preparations with listeners throughout the story.
The Old Gringo (Carlos Fuentes and Margaret Sayers Peden, trans.)
One of Carlos Fuentes's greatest works, The Old Gringo tells the story of Ambrose Bierce, the American
writer, soldier, and journalist, and of his last mysterious days in Mexico living among Pancho Villa's
soldiers, particularly his encounter with General Tomas Arroyo. In the end, the incompatibility of the two
countries (or, paradoxically, their intimacy) claims both men, in a novel that is, most of all, about the tragic
history of two cultures in conflict.
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez)
This landmark novel by Colombia's great Nobelist chronicles the irreconcilable conflict in the Buendia
family between the desire for solitude and the need for love. Its rich, imaginative prose introduced to the
world the genre known as "magical realism." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
While delivering a message to her father, Florentino Ariza spots the barely pubescent Fermina Daza and
immediately falls in love. What follows is the story of a passion that extends over 50 years, as Fermina is
courted solely by letter, decisively rejects her suitor when he first speaks, and then joins the urbane Dr.
Summer Reading 2013
Pre-AP English II
Mrs. Johnson
Juvenal Urbino, much above her station, in a marriage initially loveless but ultimately remarkable in its
strength. Florentino remains faithful in his fashion; paralleling the tale of the marriage is that of his
numerous liaisons, all ultimately without the depth of love he again declares at Urbino's death. In
substance and style not as fantastical, as mythologizing, as the previous works, this is a compelling
exploration of the myths we make of love. This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
In the Time of the Butterflies (Julia Alverez)
Alvarez follows her charming first novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), with a broader,
deeper, and even more affecting second one. It's a true story drawn from the history of her native
Dominican Republic, about the Mirabel sisters, who, along with their husbands, were instrumental in the
formation of an underground resistance movement against the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.
What Alvarez achievesso effortlessly and splendidly, with controlled emotion and resonant detailis a novel
with a beautifully balanced sense of domestic as well as political drama. She portrays the sisters as they
grow from girls into women and follows their paths from school, boys, marriage, and children to even
greaterlife-and-deathconcerns. Her novel is a statement about politics and history told in very human
terms and, as importantly, told not with outrage, but with self-possession.
Caramelo (Sandra Cisneros)
Adult/High School-A rich family tale, based on Cisneros's own childhood. Although lengthy, the book will
appeal to many teens, particularly girls, because of its compelling coming-of-age theme and its array of
eccentric, romantic characters. Celaya Reyes, called LaLa, is the youngest and the only girl among seven
siblings. The book follows her from infancy to adolescence as she grows up in a noisy, disputatious, and
loving clan of Mexican Americans struggling to be successful in the United States while remaining true to
their cultural heritage. The Reyes's annual car journey from Chicago to Mexico City for a visit with the
matriarch known as "The Awful Grandmother" is both a trial and a treat for LaLa. The imaginative and
sensitive girl often feels lost within the family hilarity and histrionics, but she gradually forms an uneasy
bond with her grandmother, inheriting from her the family stories, legends, and scandals. Eventually LaLa
fashions these into a weave of "healthy lies" that chronicles the movements and adventures, both factual
and imaginary, of several lively generations above and below the border. Her telling is a skillful blending
of many narrative threads, creating a whole as colorful and charming as the heirloom striped shawl that
gives the novel its title.
Bless Me, Ultima (Rudalfo Anaya)
Exquisite prose and wondrous storytelling have helped make Rudolfo Anaya the father of Chicano
literature in English. Indeed, Anaya's tales fairly shimmer with the haunting beauty and richness of his
culture. The winner of the Pen Center West Award for Fiction for his unforgettable novel Alburquerque,
Anaya is perhaps best loved for his classic bestseller, Bless Me, Ultima... 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 probe the family ties that bind and rend him, and he will
discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past-a mythic legacy as palpable as the Catholicism
of Latin America. 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 (Sandra Cisneros)
Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught everywhere from inner-city grade schools to
universities across the country, and translated all over the world, 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.
Zoot Suit (Luis Valdez) --you need only read Zoot Suit
This collection contains three of playwright and screenwriter Luis Valdez's most important and recognized
plays: Zoot Suit, Bandido! and I Don't Have to Show You No Stinking Badges. The anthology also
includes an introduction by noted theater critic Dr. Jorge Huerta of the University of California-San Diego.
Summer Reading 2013
Pre-AP English II
Mrs. Johnson
Luis Valdez, the most recognized and celebrated Hispanic playwright of our times, is the director of the
famous farm-worker theater, El Teatro Campesino.
Non-fiction titles
A Summer Life (Gary Soto)
Gary Soto writes that when he was five "what I knew best was at ground level." In this lively collection of
short essays, Soto takes his reader to a ground-level perspective, resreating in vivid detail the sights,
sounds, smells, and textures he knew growing up in his Fresno, California, neighborhood. The "things" of
his boyhood tie it all together: his Buddha "splotched with gold," the taps of his shoes and the "engines of
sparks that lived beneath my soles," his worn tennies smelling of "summer grass, asphalt, the moist sock
breathing the defeat of basesall." The child's world is made up of small things--small, very important
things.
Borderlands (Gloria Anzaldúa)
Anzaldua is a self-proclaimed borderland beinga Chicana who lives close to the border between Mexico
and Texas, who shares several cultures and uses a mixture of languages. With exceptional insight, she
creates a mosaic of the marginal person: a person, like herself, who exists in a state of transition, of
ambivalence, of conflict; someone who is infused with many cultures yet cannot claim a single one wholly
for herself. Her journal is written in earth tones, like an Aztec design, tones that are both engaging and
striking. Weaving prose with poetry, Mexican-Indian history with psychology, mythology with philosophy,
the author pulls together the frazzled edges of Chicano culture and of her sense of self. Anzaldua is a
rebellious and willful talent who recognizes that life on the border"life in the shadows"is vital territory for
both literature and civilization.
Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (Judith Ortiz Cofer)
The essays and poems in Ortiz Cofer's latest collection bridge the gap between autobiography and fiction,
between personal remembrance and social commentary. As she shuttles between her village in Puerto
Rico and the concrete high-rise "barrio" in Paterson, N.J., where her family lived half of each year, Ortiz
Cofer faces the displacement that all military children--her father was in the U.S. Navy--must endure. But
her cultural dichotomy is more acute. Indeed, it forms the narrative structure of the book, providing the
context for the timeless themes of coming of age. In "The Looking-Glass Shame," she contrasts her
mother's implacable ties to island tradition with her own freedom to break them. Yet while America, "Los
Nueva Yores," opens up new vistas for the author, it also threatens to eradicate her ancestral
foundations, her deepest, most poignant childhood memories. Poet and novelist Ortiz Cofer ( The Line of
the Sun ) recovers the warp and weft of her experience in stellar stories patterned after oral tradition.
Essays appeared previously in the Georgia Review and other publications.
Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines (Stephanie Elizondo Griest)
"[O]ne thing is undeniable about Griest: This chica's got guts. The systematic self-incrimination she
repeatedly displays and the frenzied compulsions fueling her quest to figure out just how Mexican she
truly is -- if at all -- are what make Griest's work important. It speaks to the larger truths all biethnic
individuals are fixated on but aren't always as willing to expose with such intense honesty and nerve. So
we continue watching with an interest best described as uneasy. We know what is at stake for this writer,
for all hyphenated Americans confronting their heritages, each curious to see what happens when Griest
chooses to fling herself in front of the next moving vehicle, hoping the epiphany it heralds will be enough."
-- Los Angeles Times
Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child (Elva Trevino Hart)
A vividly told autobiographical account of the life of a child growing up in a family of migrant farm workers.
It brings to life the day-to-day existence of people facing the obstacles of working in the fields and raising
a family in an environment that is frequently hostile to those who have little education and speak another
language. Assimilation brings its own problems, as the original culture is attenuated and the quality of
family relationships is comprimised, consequences that are not inevitable but are instead a series of
Summer Reading 2013
Pre-AP English II
Mrs. Johnson
choices made along the way. It is also the story of how the author overcame the disadvantages of this
background and found herself.
Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (Richard Roderiguez)
An explorer of cultural identity, Rodriguez builds on his acclaimed memoir Hunger of Memory with 10
luminous, loosely linked essays on the tensions and cross-pollinations of race, religion and geography in
Californians of Mexican descent. For Rodriguez, a middle-age Californian of Mexican heritage and of selfdescribed Indian mien, Mexico City's miscegenation makes it the capital of modernity. America's
immigrant culture implies not motherhood but adoption, and the growth of evangelical Protestantism
among California's Hispanic population suggests a longing for some lost Catholic village. No apostle of
political correctness, Rodriguez muses on his state's heritage and concludes, We are all bandits, for the
U.S. stole California from Mexico, which stole the land from Spain, which stole it from the Indians.
Rodriguez's autobiographical style sometimes reveals too little, as in an essay on gay life in San
Francisco, but his insights, irony and descriptions (Tijuana is Disney Calcutta) make the writing richly
evocative. However, the book would have gained power had Rodriguez tried harder to thread the essays
into a sustained narrative. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Other notable Latin American authors:
Pablo Neruda
Octavio Paz
Gabriela Mistral
Miguel Angel Asturias
Derek Walcott
V.S. Naipaul
Books (full length) from these authors would also be acceptable. Any other selection will have
to be pre-authorized.
My school email address is patricia.johnson@cushing.k12.ok.us if you have any questions
about the selections or how to answer questions.
I check my email in the summer at least once a week, so you may have to wait for an answer.
Also, I work at the Cushing Aquatic Center in the summer, so you might be able to catch me
there.