Sophomore Summer Reading
Directions for your summer reading assignment:
1. Read one of the following books from the list of suggested titles that have been specially selected for your enjoyment
and purposefully linked with units in next year’s English curriculum. It is preferred that you purchase your own
book so that you can write and highlight directly in it. *If you are not able to purchase your own book, we have
set aside a title that may be borrowed from the school before you leave for summer vacation.
*How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez
The Garcías—Dr. Carlos (Papi), his wife Laura (Mami), and their four daughters, Carla, Sandra, Yolanda,
and Sofía—belong to the uppermost echelon of Spanish Caribbean society, descended from the
conquistadores. Their family compound adjoins the palacio of the dictator’s daughter. So when Dr. García’s
part in a coup attempt is discovered, the family must flee. They arrive in New York City in 1960 to a life far
removed from their existence in the Dominican Republic. It's a long way from Santo Domingo to the Bronx,
but if anyone can go the distance, it's the Garcia girls. Four lively latinas plunged from a pampered life of
privilege on an island compound into the big-city chaos of New York, they rebel against Mami and Papi's
old-world discipline and embrace all that America has to offer.
Funny in Farsi by Firoozeh Dumas
Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumas’s wonderfully engaging family: her engineer
father, a sweetly quixotic dreamer who first sought riches on Bowling for Dollars and in Las Vegas, and later
lost his job during the Iranian revolution; her elegant mother, who never fully mastered English (nor cared
to); her uncle, who combated the effects of American fast food with an army of miraculous American weightloss gadgets; and Firoozeh herself, who as a girl changed her name to Julie, and who encountered a second
wave of culture shock when she met and married a Frenchman, becoming part of a one-couple melting pot.
Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth
Goodbye, Columbus is the story of Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin, he of poor Newark,
she of suburban Short Hills, who meet one summer break and dive into an affair that is as much about social
class and suspicion as it is about love. The novella is accompanied by five short stories that range in tone
from the iconoclastic to the astonishingly tender and that illuminate the subterranean conflicts between parents
and children and friends and neighbors in the American Jewish diaspora.
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just
returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her
mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her
beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell
Skeeter where she has gone. Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white
child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died. Minny, Aibileen’s best
friend, is perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody’s business, but she can’t
mind her tongue, so she’s lost yet another job. Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these
women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk.
2. Annotate (mark the text, take notes, highlight, write in the margins) as you read your book. Please see page 2
for an example of how to thoroughly annotate your reading. NOTE: If you have borrowed a book or are
reading an ebook version on a mobile device, a computer, Nook, Ipad or Kindle, YOU ARE
RESPONSIBLE FOR PRINTING OUT YOUR ANNOTATIONS
3. Your summer reading and annotations/notes are due on the first full day of school. Your summer reading title
and your annotations will be used and graded in a variety of ways throughout the first unit next year. For
example, if an essay or a seminar discussion is used to assess your summer reading, the annotations/notes will
be needed for that as well.
4. As you read and annotate, look for connections to the following Enduring Understandings and Essential
Questions.
 Enduring Understandings:
A fair society is a tolerant society where all rights are respected.
 Tolerance in society can be achieved by education, personal experience, social constraint, and intervention.
 Effective writing is marked by clear focus, textual and outside support for analysis
Essential questions
 What behaviors/beliefs lead to intolerance?
 What constitutes a fair society?