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Summer 2007 Book List for
Session 2
Here are the books we will be working
with this year in session 1. These books will generate themes to explore,
discussions in our book group time, and provide the jumping off point
for many activities together. Campers will enjoy being familiar with these
books. You can find them at your local library, or I suggest one of my
favorite sites for great used books, www.half.com.
Enjoy!!
Green Angel by Alice
Hoffman, The Neverending Story by
Michael Ende, The Secret Life of Bees
by Sue Monk Kidd, and new this Year, The
Living Language Reader, selections of poetry and prose from across
many genres and authors.
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Green lives in the country
with her market gardener parents and her younger sister Aurora. Aurora
laughs and dances, her glowing white hair an extra moon. Green, by
contrast, is quiet and moody, promising herself she will open to the
world after she turns sixteen. However, she has the greenest thumb
in the family. She may prefer plants to people, but what she touches,
grows. She can hear plants growing.
One day her parents ask her to stay behind and weed
while they take Aurora to the city to sell produce. Green feels
left out, and doesn't say goodbye. While they are gone, fire engulfs
the city, laying it to waste.
Alone yet alive, Green regrets her anger. A hawk
befriends Green, and songbirds, and a mysterious white dog, but
nothing is enough to stop her from tattooing ravens into her skin
by candlelight each night.....
Green Angel is a short book, an easy read.
Part fable, part fairy tale, it reads like a prose poem.
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This is truly a Neverending
Story, most of which springs from the imagination of the unlikely
human hero, Master Bux, who steals the titular tome, and flees with
it to the safety of his school attic, where he becomes much more than
a casual onlooker of the worlds of Fantastica.
Michael Ende's imagination works overtime in creating Fantastica
and all its inhabitants, and for each thrilling chapter, he introduces
another story to be told at another time.
The main story however, is the metamorphosis of Bastian Bux from
a frightened, insecure child, and the new relationship he is able
to forge with his father after his great learning adventure.
Be wary in your reading of the adventures of The Childlike Empress,
Atreyu, Morla, Ygramul, Falkor, Grograman, Hero Hynreck and Xayide,
among others, beware the Nothing, and be careful what you wish for,
least you also become a part of the Neverending Story, and forever
lose your memories of this life...
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Honey-sweet but never
cloying, this debut by nonfiction author Kidd (The Dance of the
Dissident Daughter) features a hive's worth of appealing female
characters, an offbeat plot and a lovely style. It's 1964, the year
of the Civil Rights Act, in Sylvan, S.C. Fourteen-year-old Lily
is on the lam with motherly servant Rosaleen, fleeing both Lily's
abusive father T. Ray and the police who battered Rosaleen for defending
her new right to vote. Lily is also fleeing memories, particularly
her jumbled recollection of how, as a frightened four-year-old,
she accidentally shot and killed her mother during a fight with
T. Ray. Among her mother's possessions, Lily finds a picture of
a black Virgin Mary with "Tiburon, S.C." on the back so,
blindly, she and Rosaleen head there. It turns out that the town
is headquarters of Black Madonna Honey, produced by three middle-aged
black sisters, August, June and May Boatwright. The "Calendar
sisters" take in the fugitives, putting Lily to work in the
honey house, where for the first time in years she's happy. But
August, clearly the queen bee of the Boatwrights, keeps asking Lily
searching questions. Faced with so ideally maternal a figure as
August, most girls would babble uncontrollably. But Lily is a budding
writer, desperate to connect yet fiercely protective of her secret
interior life. Kidd's success at capturing the adolescent girl's
voice makes her ambivalence comprehensible and charming. And it's
deeply satisfying when August teaches Lily to "find the mother
in (herself)" a soothing lesson that should charm female readers
of all ages. |
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