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Summary
Based on incidents that took place in the southwestern United States and Mexico around 1850, this novel chronicles the crimes of a band of desperados, with a particular focus on one, "the kid," a boy of fourteen.
An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place...
2) Penrod
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Newton Booth Tarkington (1869—1946) was an American dramatist and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. Among only three other novelists to have won the Pulitzer Prize more than once, Tarkington was one of the greatest authors of the 1910s and 1920s who helped usher in Indiana's Golden Age of literature. In his 1914 work "Penrod", Tarkington presents a series of sketches that depict the adventures of an eleven-year-old boy called Penrod Schofield living...
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Two children, Barty and Angel, were born on the same day, on opposite ends of the same California town. They aren't connected in any way except by their shared birthday, their unusually high intelligence, and the fact that their births were precipitated by tragic events. But the serial killer Junior Cain sees signs that somewhere out there, a child has been born who will punish him for his crimes unless he can find and kill that child first.
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Series
Last picture show volume 1
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In the north Texas town of Thalia in the 1950s, Sam the Lion, owner of the movie theatre, looks after the boys in town after all three of his sons die.
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Narrator Jack and his mother, who was kidnapped seven years earlier when she was a 19-year-old college student, celebrate his fifth birthday. They live in a tiny, 11-foot-square soundproofed cell in a converted shed in the kidnapper's yard. The sociopath, whom Jack has dubbed Old Nick, visits at night, grudgingly doling out food and supplies. But Ma, as Jack calls her, proves to be resilient and resourceful--and attempts a nail-biting escape.
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From award-winning, bestselling author Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five comes a powerful YA novel in verse about a boy who is wrongfully incarcerated. The story that I thought was my life didn't start on the day I was born. Amal Shahid has always been an artist and a poet. But even in a diverse art school, he's seen as disruptive and unmotivated by a biased system. Then one fateful night, an altercation in a...
9) Ham on rye
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A down-and-out writer recalls his childhood, schooling, and the years leading up to World War II.
10) The red pony
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The classic story of a boy's journey to manhood under the joys and hardships of ranch life, focused around the life and death of his red pony.
11) The kite runner
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Overview: A deluxe collector's edition of the phenomenally bestselling The Kite Runner, filled with striking and memorable photographs that bring Khaled Hosseini's compelling story to life. Since its publication in 2003, The Kite Runner has shipped over four million copies and spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list. Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy through the horrific rule of the Taliban, The Kite...
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David Copperfield enjoys an idyllic life with his gentle, widowed mother and his loving nurse, Peggotty. Then tragedy strikes when Mr. Murdstone weds David's mother and drives her to an early grave. Despised by his stepfather, the boy is forced to live in misery and poverty until he runs away to throw himself upon the mercy of his eccentric aunt. Charles Dickens's classic tale of growing up.
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Summary
"Pi Patel is an unusual boy. The son of a zookeeper, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior, a fervent love of stories, and practices not only his native Hinduism, but also Christianity and Islam. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes. The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan,...
15) Game changer
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After an especially rough tackle on the football field, Ash thinks he might be suffering some permanent damage, because suddenly stop signs are blue and always have been. After the second universe-altering hit, he drives a Beemer instead of a Dodge, and a pair of interdimensional twins promises him answers. The more universes he visits, the more Ash has to face perspectives he never thought to consider before, and the closer the universe gets to complete...
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The reality of frontier life in Kansas in 1872 becomes brutally clear to twelve-year-old Coady McIlvain when his father is scalped by hostile Indians and Coady is taken prisoner. Determined to escape, he falls in with Dylan Griffith, a buffalo sharpshooter, and the two face real adventure surviving the unforgiving terrain with Coady's former captors on their trail.
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Truman Capote’s first novel is a story of almost supernatural intensity and inventiveness, an audacious foray into the mind of a sensitive boy as he seeks out the grown-up enigmas of love and death in the ghostly landscape of the deep South.
“Intense, brilliant . . . . Capote has an astonishing command . . . a magic all his own.” —The Atlantic
At the age of twelve, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the...
“Intense, brilliant . . . . Capote has an astonishing command . . . a magic all his own.” —The Atlantic
At the age of twelve, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the...
18) The talisman
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On a brisk autumn day, a thirteen-year-old boy stands on the shores of the gray Atlantic, near a silent amusement park and a fading ocean resort called the Alhambra. The past has driven Jack Sawyer here: his father is gone, his mother is dying, and the world no longer makes sense. But for Jack everything is about to change. For he has been chosen to make a journey back across America - and into another realm.
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"From UK bestselling author Gillian McAllister comes an astonishing, compulsively twisty psychological thriller about a mother who witnesses her teenage son stab a man and then seizes on an unconventional way to try to save him. Can you stop a murder after it's already happened? Late October. After midnight. You're waiting up for your seventeen-year-old son. He's late. As you watch from the window, he emerges, and you realize he isn't alone: he's...
20) Kim
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Rudyard Kipling's epic rendition of the imperial experience in India is also his greatest long work. Born in India and growing into early manhood, Kim is the son of an Irish soldier born under British Imperial rule in 19th century India. Left in the care of a half-caste woman, Kim is free to explore the back allies and bazaars of Lahore. But when he meets with his father's old regiment he trades his native clothes for European suits and abandons his...