8th Grade Reading Titles

 

Ten strangers--each with a sordid past--are summoned by an absent millionaire to a private island off the coast of Devon and begin to die one by one upon arrival.

A thirteen-year-old Dutch-Jewish girl records her impressions of the two years she and seven others spent hiding from the Nazis before they were discovered and taken to concentration camps.

 

Ben Franklin narrated and lived the Great American Success Story. Author Tim E. Ogline writes and illustrates this book on Benjamin Franklin and tells the story of his life and times with wry wit and whimsical drawings.

 

Needing money for school, a college student accepts a job as a guide on a desert hunting trip and nearly loses his life.

 

Nick's father and others are taken prisoner when his plantation in Burma is invaded by the Japanese in 1941, leaving Nick and his friend Mya to risk their lives in order to free them from the POW camp.

 

 

Charlie Gordon, born with an unusually low IQ, must face his gradual return to his former state when the astounding results of an experimental surgery that increased his intelligence prove to be only temporary.

 

Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit, becomes a thief for a band of dwarves and soon finds himself in the midst of a war with the evil goblins and wargs, and forced to make a decision between the call of duty and the pull of the simple life.

Sequels: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King

 

Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen accidentally becomes a contender in the annual Hunger Games, a grave competition hosted by the Capitol where young boys and girls are pitted against one another in a televised fight to the death.

Sequels: Catching Fire, Mockingjay

 

A car accident causes fifteen-year-old Izzy to lose one leg and face the need to start building a new life as an amputee.

 

After injuring his hand, a silversmith's apprentice in Boston becomes a messenger for the Sons of Liberty in the days before the American Revolution.

 

 

A true account of the author's experiences as a Jewish boy with his family in a Nazi concentration camp.

Sequels: Dawn, Day

 

A ninth-grader's suspension for humming "The Star-Spangled Banner" during homeroom becomes a national news story, and leads to him and his teacher both leaving the school.

 

Rivalry between rich and poor gangs in 1960's Oklahoma leads to the deaths of three teenagers and intense soul-searching for one of the kids involved, a sensitive fourteen-year-old writer named Ponyboy.

 

A fourteen-year-old boy attempts to be the youngest person to reach the top of Mount Everest.

Sequels: The Edge

 

Two teenagers caught in a snowstorm face a fight for survival after they become stranded in a desolate area of New York.

 

 

Encouraged by her idealistic if luckless father, a bright and imaginative young woman comes of age in a Brooklyn tenement during the early 1900s.

 

 

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.

 

In 1659, fourteen-year-old Mary Newbury keeps a journal of her voyage from England to the New World and her experiences living as a witch in a community of Puritans near Salem, Massachusetts.

Sequels: Sorceress