Middle Years Program Reading Suggestions

For those of you who want to expand your horizons and immerse yourself in a new culture, different from your own, check out any of these books.

All of these titles are available in the City Honors School Library.

HAPPY READING!

• Bless Me, Ultima / Rudolfo A Anaya. -- New York : Warner Books, 1991, c1972. Novel of life in the American Southwest for a Chicano family.
• Empire of the Sun / J. G Ballard. -- New York : Simon and Schuster, c1984.
• The examination / Malcolm J Bosse. -- New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, c1994. Fifteen-year-old Hong and his older brother Chen face famine, flood, pirates, and jealous rivals on their journey through fifteenth century China as Chen pursues his calling as a scholar and Hong becomes involved with a secret society known as the White Lotus.
• The good earth / Pearl S Buck, and Peter J Conn. -- New York : Washington Square Press, 1994. Border witness: Youth confront NAFTA / Maureen Casey. - NY : New York State Labor-Religion Coalition, 2001. A photographic essay in English and Spanish with the voices of people who have traveled to the border of Mexico.
• Wandering warrior / Da Chen. -- New York : Delacorte Press, 2003.
• Dragon dance / John Christopher. -- New York : Dutton, c1986. Third vol. in author's The fireball trilogy. Simon and Brad's fireball adventures take them to ancient China where they are exposed to incredible practices of mind control.
• The house of sixty fathers / Meindert De Jong, and Maurice Sendak. - New York : Harper & Row, 1987, c1956. Alone in a sampan with his pig and three ducklings, a little Chinese boy is whirled down a raging river, back to the town from which he and his parents had escaped the invading Japanese, and spends long and frightening days regaining his family and new home.
• Thirty-three multicultural tales to tell / Pleasant DeSpain, and Joe Shlichta. -- Little Rock : August House, c1993. A collection of folktales from around the world, selected for their "tellability."
• Tulku / Peter Dickinson. -- New York : Dutton, 1979. A thirteen-year-old boy escapes from slaughter by the Boxers in China and joins forces with an English botanist and her escort, traveling with them to Tibet where the power of Buddhist monks transforms the lives of all of them.
• The breadwinner / Deborah Ellis. -- Toronto : Douglas & McIntyre, c2000.
• Parvana's journey / Deborah Ellis. -- Toronto : Groundwood Books/Douglas & McIntyre, 2002.
• Overboard / Elizabeth Fama. -- Chicago : Cricket Books, c2002. Escaping from a sinking ferry in the waters off Sumatra, fourteen-year old Emily fights for survival for herself and a young Indonesian boy, who draws courage from his quiet but firm Islamic faith.
• Melting pot or not / Paula Angle Franklin. -- Springfield, N.J : Enslow Publishers, c1995. Debates whether new immigrants should maintain their cultural identity, or become "Americanized."
• Coming of age in America / Mary Frosch, and Mary Frosch. -- New York : New Press, 1995, c1994. Anthology of that explores coming of age in fifteen different ethnic groups in the U.S.
• CrashBoomLove / Juan Felipe Herrera. -- Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, 2001, c1999. After his father leaves home, sixteen-year-old Cesar Garcia lives with his mother and struggles through the painful experiences of growing up as a Mexican American high school student.
• The circuit / Francisco Jiménez. -- Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, c1997.
• China boy / Gus Lee. -- New York : Plume, 1994, c1991. A young boy copes with survival in a Chinese-American family in the 1950s in this moving and funny novel.
• The last Snake Runner / Kimberley Griffiths Little. -- New York : Knopf, 2002. Fourteen-year-old Kendall, half Anglo and half Acoma Indian, travels through time to sixteenth-century Acoma, New Mexico, where, in the midst of the invasion of Spanish conquistadors, he joins his Acoma ancestors to play his destined role as the last member of the Snake Clan.
• America street / Anne Mazer, and Anne Mazer. -- New York : Persea Books, 1993. Fourteen stories by American authors from diverse racial and cultural backgrounds, including Duane Big Eagle, Nicholasa Mohr, Lensey Namioka, and Robert Cormier.
• The kite rider / Geraldine McCaughrean. -- New York : HarperCollins, 2002. In thirteenth-century China, after trying to save his widowed mother from a horrendous second marriage, twelve-year-old Haoyou has life-changing adventures when he takes to the sky as a circus kite rider and ends up meeting the great Mongol ruler Kublai Khan.
• Shizuko's daughter / Kyoko Mori. -- New York : Ballantine Books, 1994, c1993. After her mother's suicide when she is twelve years old, Yuki spends years living with her distant father and his resentful new wife, cut off from her mother's family, and relying on her own inner strength to cope with the tragedy.
• King of the cloud forests / Michael Morpurgo. -- New York, N.Y : Puffin Books, 1991, c1987. After being rescued in the mountains of Tibet by a near-human tribe who revere him as a god, Ashley must choose between returning to the violence of the village he fled and the tests of courage that await him as the tribe's god.
• An ocean apart, a world away / Lensey Namioka. -- New York : Delacorte Press, c2002.
• Ties that bind, ties that break / Lensey Namioka. -- New York : Delacorte Press, 1999. Ailin's life takes a different turn when she defies the traditions of upper class Chinese society by refusing to have her feet bound.
• Half and half / Claudine C O'Hearn, and Claudine C O'Hearn. -- New York : Pantheon Books, c1998. Contains eighteen essays in which the authors discuss the difficulties and benefits of being biracial and bicultural.
• When my name was Keoko / Linda Sue Park. -- New York : Clarion Books, c2002. With national pride and occasional fear, a brother and sister face the increasingly oppressive occupation of Korea by Japan during World War II, which threatens to suppress Korean culture entirely.
• A single shard / Linda Sue Park. -- New York : Clarion Books, 2001. Tree-ear, a thirteen-year-old orphan in medieval Korea, lives under a bridge in a potters' village, and longs to learn how to throw the delicate celadon ceramics himself.
• Rebels of the heavenly kingdom / Katherine Paterson. -- New York : Avon Books, 1984. Abducted from his home by bandits, fifteen-year-old Wang Lee is rescued from slavery by a mysterious girl who introduces him to the Taiping Tienkuo, a secret society partly based on Christian principles and dedicated to the overthrow of the Manchu government.
• The crossing / Gary Paulsen. -- New York : Dell, 1990, c1987. Fourteen-year-old Manny, a street kid fighting for survival in a Mexican border town, develops a strange friendship with an emotionally disturbed American soldier who decides to help him get across the border.
• Esperanza rising / Pam Muñoz Ryan. -- New York : Scholastic Press, 2000. Esperanza and her mother are forced to leave their life of wealth and privilege in Mexico to go work in the labor camps of Southern California, where they must adapt to the harsh circumstances facing Mexican farm workers on the eve of the Great Depression.
• Skywoman / Joanne Shenandoah, Douglas M George, Ka-Hon-Hes, and Fadden David Kanietakeron. -- Santa Fe, N.M : Clear Light Publishers, c1998.
• The hundred secret senses / Amy Tan. -- New York : G.P. Putnam's Sons, c1995. Kwan moves from China to live with her family in San Francisco and develops a relationship with her half sister Olivia. She confides in Olivia about the ghosts she hears telling her about love. Years later Kwan and her ghosts advise Olivia about her marriage.
• First they killed my father / Loung Ung. -- New York : HarperCollins, 2000. Personal account of the atrocities Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge inflicted on the people of Cambodia in the 1970s.
• The cook's family / Laurence Yep. -- New York : Putnam, c1998. As her parents' arguments become more frequent, Robin looks forward to the visits that she and her grandmother make to Chinatown, where they pretend to be an elderly cook's family, giving Robin new insights into her Chinese heritage.
• The journal of Wong Ming-Chung / Laurence Yep. -- New York : Scholastic, 2000. A young Chinese boy nicknamed Runt records his experiences in a journal as he travels from southern China to California in 1852 to join his uncle during the Gold Rush.
• Thief of hearts / Laurence Yep. -- New York : HarperCollins Publishers, 1995. When Stacy is paired with a Chinese girl at school who is accused of theft, she must come to terms with her own Chinese and American heritage.
• The case of the Goblin Pearls / Laurence Yep. -- New York : HarperCollins, 1998, c1997. Lily and her aunt, a Chinese American movie actress, join forces to solve the theft of some priceless pearls and stop the operator of a sweatshop in San Francisco's Chinatown.
• The case of the lion dance / Laurence Yep. -- New York : HarperTrophy, 1999, c1998. When $2000 is stolen during the opening of a restaurant, Lily and her aunt, a Chinese American movie actress, search for the thief throughout San Francisco's Chinatown.