English 9 Individual Reading Project: Honors Novels

Presents an adventure novel that describes how Diego de la Vega, the son of a Spanish aristocrat and Shoshone woman, grew to become the elusive Zorro, who returns to California to reclaim the hacienda of his childhood and fight for the rights of the underprivileged.
Genre:Adventure Fiction, Historical Fiction

Six-year-old Antonio embarks upon a spiritual journey under the watchful guidance of Ultima, a healing woman, that leads him to question his faith and beliefs in family, religion, and other aspects of his Chicano culture.
Genre:Coming-of-Age stories

Young Ender Wiggin may prove to be the military genius Earth needs to fight a desperate battle against a deadly alien race that will determine the future of the human race.
Genre: Science Fiction

During one of his several adventurous voyages in the seventeenth century, an Englishman becomes the sole survivor of a shipwreck and lives for nearly thirty years on a desert island.
Genre:Classic; Survival stories; Adventure Fiction

Pip, an orphan in Victorian England, learns that a mysterious benefactor has ensured that he will be educated and raised as a gentleman. Includes a selection of study aids.
Genre:Classic; Coming-of-Age stories

A blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.
Genre:Historical Fiction

In the course of his wanderings from a Southern college to New York's Harlem, an African-American man becomes involved in a series of adventures. Genre:Modern Classic; African-American Fiction

When a newspaper journalist covers the trial of a Japanese American accused of murder, he must come to terms with his own past.
Genre:Relationships; Courtroom Trial Fiction

An African-American woman searches for a fulfilling relationship through two loveless marriages and finally finds it in the person of Tea Cake, an itinerant laborer and gambler.
Genre:Classic; African-American Fiction; Love stories

A satirical novel about the utopia of the future, a world in which babies are decanted from bottles and the great Ford is worshiped.
Genre:Science Fiction Classic; Dystopian Fiction

Fourteen-year-old Lily and her companion, Rosaleen, an African-American woman who has cared from Lily since her mother's death ten years earlier, flee their home after Rosaleen is victimized by racist police officers, and find asafe haven in Tiburon, South Carolina, at the home of three beekeeping sisters, May, June, and August.
Genre:Coming-of-Age stories, Women's Fiction

Taylor, a poor Kentuckian, makes her way west with an abandoned baby girl and stops in Tucson. There she finds friends and discovers resources in apparently empty places.
Genre:Women's lives and relationships; Friendship

When seventeen-year-old Molly Ayer is sent to perform community service at elderly Vivian Daly's home in order to avoid juvenile hall, she discovers that the two are very much alike, despite the vast age difference.
Genre:Women's Fiction, Relationships

A nameless man and his young son wander through a decimated landscape, searching for means of survival and a reason for hope as barbaric hordes of people roam the streets and ash falls from the sky.
Genre:Apocalyptic Fiction

An eleven-year-old African-American girl in Ohio, in the early 1940s, prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be beautiful.
Genre:Classic; African-American fiction; Coming-of-Age stories

An American soldier in Vietnam decides to leave the war and simply walks out of the jungle, with the intent of going to Paris.
Genre:Historical Fiction

Recounts the story of Reuven Malter and Danny Saunders--one an orthodox Jew, the other the son of a Hasidic rabbi--and the course of their friendship as they grow up in Brooklyn.
Genre:Jewish Fiction, Coming-of-Age

In a future world, only one man dares to think, strive, and love as an individual in the midst of a paralyzing collective humanity.
Genre:Science Fiction

A young boy in New York City, Theo Decker, miraculously survives an accident that takes the life of his mother. Alone and abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by a friend's family and struggles to make sense of his new life. In the years that follow, he becomes entranced by one of the few things that reminds him of his mother, a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the art underworld.
Genre:Coming-of-Age Stories

Tells the story of two African-American sisters: Nettie, a missionary in Africa, and Celie, a child-wife living in the south, in the medium of their letters to each other and in Celie's case, the desperate letters she begins, "Dear God."
Genre:Classic; African-American Fiction

Trapped in the poverty-stricken ghetto of Chicago's South Side, a young African-American man finds release only in acts of violence.
Genre:African-American Fiction, Coming-of-Age