Literature circle book options

1. Literature circle book options

2. BOOKS DUE: Feb. 6th • On Sale at CHMS: Monday February 4th -6th. • Night - $9.95 • Sarah’s Key - $13.95 • Anne Frank the Diary of a Young Girl - $5.99 • The Book Thief - $12.99 • Boy in the Striped Pajamas - $8.99 • Tropical Secrets – hardback - $16.99 • MausII - $15.95 • Farewell to Manzanar - $8.99 • Milkweed- $7.99

3. Night • Night, an autobiographical account of life in the Nazi death camps, is a must-read. Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel takes his readers with him from his home, into the ghetto, on the transport, through Selections, into the concentration camps, on the Death March, and beyond. Reading this book gives one a deeper and more personal understanding of the Holocaust experience. Only with this understanding can one genuinely remember the Holocaust and thus help ensure it won't happen again.

4. Sarah’s Key • http://weinsteinco.com/sites/sarahs-key/ • Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours. • Paris, May 2002: On Vel’ d’Hiv’s 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that terrible term in the Veld'Hiv', to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life. • Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode.

5. Tropical Secrets • Daniel has escaped Nazi Germany with nothing but a desperate dream that he might one day find his parents again. But that golden land called New York has turned away his ship full of refugees, and Daniel finds himself in Cuba. • As the tropical island begins to work its magic on him, the young refugee befriends a local girl with some painful secrets of her own. Yet even in Cuba, the Nazi darkness is never far away.

6. Anne Frank the Diary of a Young Girl • Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank's remarkable diary has since become a world classic—a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. In 1942, with Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, they and another family lived cloistered in the "Secret Annex" of an old office building. Cut off from the outside world, they faced hunger, boredom, the constant cruelties of living in confined quarters, and the ever-present threat of discovery and death. In her diary Anne Frank recorded vivid impressions of her experiences during this period. By turns thoughtful, moving, and amusing, her account offers a fascinating commentary on human courage and frailty and a compelling self-portrait of a sensitive and spirited young woman whose promise was tragically cut short

7. Farewell to Manzanar • During World War II a community called Manzanar was hastily created in the high mountain desert country of California, east of the Sierras. Its purpose was to house thousands of Japanese American internees. One of the first families to arrive was the Wakatsukis, who were ordered to leave their fishing business in Long Beach and take with them only the belongings they could carry. For Jeanne Wakatsuki, a seven-year-old child, Manzanar became a way of life in which she struggled and adapted, observed and grew. For her father it was essentially the end of his life. • At age thirty-seven, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston recalls life at Manzanar through the eyes of the child she was. She tells of her fear, confusion, and bewilderment as well as the dignity and great resourcefulness of people in oppressive and demeaning circumstances.

8. Boy in the Striped pajamas • Berlin, 1942: When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovers that his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move from their home to a new house far, far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. A tall fence running alongside stretches as far as the eye can see and cuts him off from the strange people he can see in the distance. • But Bruno longs to be an explorer and decides that there must be more to this desolate new place than meets the eye. While exploring his new environment, he meets another boy whose life and circumstances are very different to his own, and their meeting results in a friendship that has devastating consequences.

9. The Book Thief • It’s just a small story really, about among other things: a girl, some words, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist-fighter, and quite a lot of thievery. . . . • Set during World War II in Germany, Markus Zusak’s groundbreaking new novel is the story of LieselMeminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement before he is marched to Dachau. • This is an unforgettable story about the ability of books to feed the soul.

10. MilkWeed • He has no name, no home, no family and no background. He steals food, sleeps in the street and survives by not getting caught. He is called a Jew, a filthy son of Abraham, a Gypsy, and Stop Thief. He sleeps in a cellar with a band of boys who are just like him, who steal to stay alive and do their best to go unnoticed by the Jackboots. • The Jackboots control Warsaw, Poland in 1939. They have power, uniforms that shine, and guns. It is not safe to be a Jew, a Gypsy or a homeless orphan. The best thing to be is invisible. • He learns his name is Misha and that he was a Gypsy until the day his family was bombed by the Jackboots, otherwise known as the Nazis. Uri, the leader of the street gang, tells him this. It is Uri who guides Misha through life on the streets, but when Misha sees a girl he knows herded into the Warsaw ghetto with her family, he knows he must follow her. • MILKWEED is a standout among Holocaust literature for children, deceptively simple and completely heartbreaking. Jerry Spinelli is a master of writing complex, emotional stories in new voices --- and this novel is no exception. The perspective of a young, impetuous smuggler is a fresh take on a tale that always bears retelling. This is a book that should not only be discussed, but experienced as well.

11. Maus II • Acclaimed as a quiet triumph and a brutally moving work of art, the first volume of Art Spiegelman'sMausintroduced readers to VladekSpieglman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist trying to come to terms with his father, his father's terrifying story, and History itself. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), succeeds perfectly in shocking us out of any lingering sense of familiarity with the events described, approaching, as it does, the unspeakable through the diminutive. • This second volume, subtitled And Here My Troubles Began, moves us from the barracks of Auschwitz to the bungalows of the Catskills. Genuinely tragic and comic by turns, it attains a complexity of theme and a precision of thought new to comics and rare in any medium. Mausties together two powerful stories: Vladek's harrowing take of survival against all odds, delineating the paradox of family life in the death camps, and the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. At every level this is the ultimate survivor's tale—and that too of the children who somehow survive even the survivors.