Marshfield High School Summer Reading
Get your summer reading at Buttonwood! You can find Marshfield High School's summer reading assignments here.
Incoming 9th grade English 0 Honors students are required to read THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES by Sue Monk Kidd.
Incoming 9th grade English Level 1 & 2 are not required to complete a summer assignment. However, they will receive extra credit for reading one book from the summer reading list and completing the assignment.
Incoming 10th grade Level 0 Honors students are required to read LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding
Incoming 10th grade Level 1 & 2 are not required to complete a summer assignment. However, they will receive extra credit for reading one book from the summer reading list and completing the assignment.
Incoming 11th grade AP Language and Composition students are required to read THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOM X and one book from the summer reading list. There are additional assignments that you can find here.
Incoming 11th grade English Level 1 & 2 are not required to complete a summer assignment. However, they will receive extra credit for reading one book from the summer reading list and completing the assignment.
Incoming 12th grade AP Literature and Composition students are required to read THE THINGS THEY CARRIED by Tim O'Brien and a fictional novel of your choice from the summer reading list. There are additional assignments that you can find here.
Incoming 12th grade English Level 1& 2 students are have requirements that you can read about here. It is optional to read one book from the summe reading list.
This is the required book for 9th Grade English Level 0 Honors.
Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted Black "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. They escape to Tiburon, South Carolina—a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of Black beekeeping sisters, Lily is introduced to their mesmerizing world of bees and honey, and the Black Madonna. This is a remarkable novel about divine female power, a story that women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come.
This is an option for the extra credit assignment for 9th Grade English Level 1 & 2 students.
I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. . . .
This is the testament of Paul Bäumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army during World War I. They become soldiers with youthful enthusiasm. But the world of duty, culture, and progress they had been taught breaks in pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principle of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against one another . . . if only he can come out of the war alive.
This is an option for the extra credit assignment for 9th Grade English Level 1 & 2 students.
Paulo Coelho's masterpiece tells the mystical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure. His quest will lead him to riches far different and far more satisfying than he ever imagined. Santiago's journey teaches us about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, of recognizing opportunity and learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, most importantly, to follow our dreams.
This is an option for the extra credit assignment for 9th Grade English Level 1 & 2 students.
The 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.
This is an option for the extra credit assignment for 9th Grade English Level 1 & 2 students.
The classic saga of an orphaned boy making his way from the sweatshops of 19th-century London to finding family, love, and the good life by giving kindness and consideration to the people he meets along the way.
This is an option for the extra credit assignment for 9th Grade English Level 1 & 2 students.
Set during World War II in Germany, Zusaks groundbreaking novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing, encounters something she cant resist: books.
This is an option for the extra credit assignment for 9th Grade English Level 1 & 2 students.
This edition of Anderson's groundbreaking classic includes a new Introduction by acclaimed writer and cultural commentator Ford, an Afterword by Reynolds, the "New York Times"-bestselling author of "All American Boys, " an updated Q&A, resource list, and an essay and poem from Anderson.
This is an option for the extra credit assignment for 9th Grade English Level 1 & 2 students.
From award-winning and bestselling author Kwame Alexander comes Solo, the story of seventeen-year-old Blade Morrison, who is being crushed between the scathing tabloids exposing his former rock-star-father's addictions and a protected secret that threatens his own identity. The answers to his past and future change everything he thought to be true.
This is the required book for 10th Grade Level 0 Honors.
The classic tale of a group of English school boys who are left stranded on an unpopulated island, and who must confront not only the defects of their society but the defects of their own natures.
This is an option for the extra credit assignment for 10th Grade English Level 1 & 2 students.
Set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s, "A Lesson Before Dying" is an "enormously moving" ("Los Angeles Times") novel of one man condemned to die for a crime he did not commit and a young man who visits him in his cell. In the end, the two men forge a bond as they both come to understand the simple heroism of resisting--and defying--the expected
This is an option for the extra credit assignment for 10th Grade English Level 1 & 2 students.
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. After the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared.
This is an option for the extra credit assignment for 10th Grade English Level 1 & 2 students.
A unique and powerful tale of a Holocaust survivor seen through the art and words of his son, America's leading avant-garde cartoonist.
This is an option for the extra credit assignment for 10th Grade English Level 1 & 2 students.
The bestselling novel and deeply affecting story of a young girl's confrontation with the legacy of Vietnam.
This is the required book for 11th Grade AP Language and Composition.
In the searing pages of this classic autobiography, originally published in 1964, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement. His fascinating perspective on the lies and limitations of the American Dream, and the inherent racism in a society that denies its nonwhite citizens the opportunity to dream, gives extraordinary insight into the most urgent issues of our own time. The Autobiography of Malcolm X stands as the definitive statement of a movement and a man whose work was never completed but whose message is timeless. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand America.
This is an option for the second required book for 11th grade AP Language and Composition.
This is also an option for the extra credit assignment for 11th grade Level 1 & 2
Obama, the son of a white American mother and a black African father, writes an elegant and compelling biography that powerfully articulates America's racial battleground and tells of his search for his place in black America. photos. High school & older.
This is an option for the second required book for 11th grade AP Language and Composition.
This is also an option for the extra credit assignment for 10th Grade English Level 1 & 2 students.
In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?
This is an option for the second required book for 11th grade AP Language and Composition.
This is also an option for the extra credit assignment for 10th Grade English Level 1 & 2 students.
With a new Introduction to this touching homage to his mother, the author paints a portrait of growing up in a black neighborhood as the child of an interracial marriage. Although raised an Orthodox Jew in the South, McBride's mother abandoned her heritage, moved to Harlem, and married a black man
This is an option for the extra credit assignment for 10th Grade English Level 1 & 2 students.
From the author of The Road to Wellville comes his most controversial novel yet--a deeply moving story of the men and women who risk everything to cross the Mexican border and invade the American dream.
This is an option for the extra credit assignment for 10th Grade English Level 1 & 2 students.
This is also an option for the second required book for 12th grade AP Literature and Composition
Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world—conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs.
This is the required book for 12th grade AP Literature and Composition.
This is also an option for the extra credit assignment for 10th Grade English Level 1 & 2 students.
This is an option for the second required book for 12th grade AP Literature and Composition
A modern classic about star-crossed lovers that explores questions of race and being Black in America--and the search for what it means to call a place home.
This is an option for the second required book for 12th grade AP Literature and Composition
A compulsively readable debut novel about marriage, immigration, class, race, and the trapdoors in the American Dream—the unforgettable story of a young Cameroonian couple making a new life in New York just as the Great Recession upends the economy
This is an option for the second required book for 12th grade AP Literature and Composition
Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery.
This is an option for the second required book for 12th grade AP Literature and Composition
The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant, it is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed.
This is an option for the second required book for 12th grade AP Literature and Composition
From the Booker Prize-winning author of "The Remains of the Day" and "When We Were Orphans" comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.
This is an option for the second required book for 12th grade AP Literature and Composition
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver's license...records my first name simply as Cal." So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.
This is an option for the second required book for 12th grade AP Literature and Composition
At once brutal and tender, despairing and rashly hopeful, spare of language and profoundly moving, this work is a fierce and haunting meditation on the tenuous divide between civilization and savagery, and the essential, sometimes terrifying power of filial love.
This is an option for the second required book for 12th grade AP Literature and Composition
Tommy Orange's wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle's death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American-grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism. Hailed as an instant classic, There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable
This is an option for the second required book for 12th grade AP Literature and Composition
For years, rumors of the "Marsh Girl" have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. She's barefoot and wild; unfit for polite society. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark. But Kya is not what they say. Abandoned at age ten, she has survived on her own in the marsh that she calls home. A born naturalist with just one day of school, she takes life lessons from the land, learning from the false signals of fireflies the real way of this world. But while she could have lived in solitude forever, the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. Drawn to two young men from town, who are each intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new and startling world until the unthinkable happens
This is an option for the extra credit assignment for 12th Grade English Level 1 & 2 students.
With heart-wrenching power and suspense, the bestselling author of "The Kite Runner" shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.
This is an option for the extra credit assignment for 12th Grade English Level 1 & 2 students.
Huxley's story shows a futuristic World State where all emotion, love, art, and human individuality have been replaced by social stability. An ominous warning to the world's population, this literary classic is a must-read.
This is an option for the extra credit assignment for 12th Grade English Level 1 & 2 students.
Launched in November, Dell's Kurt Vonnegut reissue program continues with one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.
This is an option for the extra credit assignment for 12th Grade English Level 1 & 2 students.
At once wildly original and stuffed with irresistible nostalgia, a spectacularly genre-busting, ambitious, and charming debut that is part quest, part love story, and part virtual space opera set in a universe where spell-slinging mages battle giant Japanese robots and flying DeLoreans.
This is an option for the extra credit assignment for 12th Grade English Level 1 & 2 students.
A timeless novel about the quest for knowledge and enlightenment Siddhartha is an insightful glimpse into the human soul, a classic novel of discovery, and a literary exploration of the true nature of purpose and spirituality.