Literature Circles

English 2D

Things to keep in mind!

• Choose a novel / book wisely• Non fiction (Long Way Gone)• Classic vs. Contemporary• Science Fiction, Dramatic, • Social issues : biotechnology, autism,

human rights, racism, • Plot twists, relationships, ethics, suspense,

conflict• Themes which you will enjoy – movies which

come to mind

•In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts.

•The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the other districts in line by forcing them to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight-to-the-death on live TV.

•One boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and sixteen are selected by lottery to play.

•The winner brings riches and favor to his or her district. But that is nothing compared to what the Capitol wins: one more year of fearful compliance with its rule.

Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives alone with her mother and younger sister, regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her impoverished district in the Games. •But Katniss has been close to dead before—and survival, for her, is second nature. Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender.

•But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weigh survival against humanity and life against love.

Where the Heart isAuthor: Billie Letts

•Novalee Nation (17 years old) on her way to Bakersfield, California. Her boyfriend, Willie Jack Pickens, abandons her in an Oklahoma Wal-Mart and takes off on his own leaving her with just 10 dollars and the clothes on her back.

•Novalee, who is "seventeen, seven months pregnant, thirty-seven pounds overweight--and superstitious about sevens....

•Novalee has always been unlucky with sevens. She's seventeen, seven months pregnant, thirty-seven pounds overweight -- and now she finds herself stranded at a Wal-Mart in Sequoyah, Oklahoma, holding just $7. 77 in change.

•For most people, sevens were lucky. But not for her," Billie Letts writes. "She'd had a bad history with them, starting with her seventh birthday, the day Momma Nell ran away with a baseball umpire named Fred..."

•Finds herself alone and penniless in Sequoyah, Oklahoma in the Wal-Mart parking lot

•Within hours Novalee has met three people who will change her life: Sister Thelma Husband – takes her in a kindly eccentric; Benny Goodluck, a young Native American boy; Moses Whitecot

ton, an elderly African American photographer urges her to pursue her raw talent in photography – teaches her everything he knows.

•For the next two months, Novalee makes her home in the Wal-Mart, sleeping there at night, exploring the town by day.

•When she goes into labor and delivers her baby there, Novalee learns that sometimes it's not so bad to depend on the kindness of strangers—

•especially if one of them happens to be Sam Walton, the superchain's founder (he gives her a job) keeping careful accounts until giving birth to the "Wal-Mart baby" turns her into a local celebrity.

•Happily, the community reaches out to Novalee and baby Americus.

“Where the Heart Is puts a human face on the look-alike trailer parks and malls of America's small towns. “

“It will make you believe in the strength of friendship, the goodness of down-to-earth people, and the healing power of love. And it will make you laugh and cry...every step of the way.”

To Kill a Mockingbird• Scout Finch lives with her brother, Jem, and their

widowed father, Atticus

• Atticus is a prominent lawyer and the Finch familyis reasonably well off in comparison to the rest of society.

• One summer, Jem and Scout befriend a boy named Dill, who has come to live in their neighborhood for the summer.

• Eventually, Dill becomes fascinated with the spooky house on their street called the Radley Place.

• The house is owned by Mr. Nathan Radley, whose brother, Arthur (nicknamed Boo), has lived there for years without venturing outside.

• Scout and Jem find gifts apparently left for them in a knothole of a tree on the Radley property.

• Scout, Jem, and Dill begin to act out the story of Boo Radley

• Atticus puts a stop to their antics, urging the children to try to see life from another person’s perspective before making judgments.

• Atticus faces the mob down the night before the trial. Jem and Scout, who have sneaked out of the house, soon join him

• He menaces Tom Robinson’s widow, tries to break into the judge’s house, and finally attacks Jem and Scout as they walk home from a Halloween party.

• Boo Radley intervenes, however, saving the children and stabbing Ewell fatally during the struggle.,

• Scout feels as though she can finally imagine what life is like for Boo. He has become a human being to her at last.

• With this realization, Scout embraces her father’s advice to practice sympathy and understanding and demonstrates that her experiences with hatred and prejudice will not sully her faith in human goodness.

• But, on Dill’s last night in Maycomb for the summer, the three sneak onto the Radley property, where Nathan Radley shoots at them.

• Boo leaves more presents in the knothole? (supposedly)

• To the horror of Maycomb’s racist white community, Atticus agrees to defend a black man named Tom Robinson, who has been accused of raping a white woman

• The woman actually propostioned Robinson and when they were caught together, saved face by crying rape.

. • Because of Atticus’s decision, Jem and

Scout are subjected to abuse from other children,

• Tom Robinson’s trial begins, and when the accused man is placed in the local jail, a mob gathers to lynch him.

• Atticus faces the mob down the night before the trial. Jem and Scout, who have sneaked out of the house, soon join him

• Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime • What makes this interesting is the point of

view – autistic perspective….very innocent , frustrating…evokes compassion, empathy

• 15 year old Christopher John Francis Boone – obsessed with Sherlock Holmes

• Christopher Boone is a 15-year-old boy, mathematically gifted and socially hopeless

• Knows every country in the world and capitals and every prime number up to 7057

• relaxes by groaning and doing math problems in his head, eats red-but not yellow or brown-foods and screams when he is touched.

• Christopher can only make sense of the chaos of stimuli by imposing arbitrary patterns ("4 yellow cars in a row made it a Black Day, which is a day when I don't speak to anyone and sit on my own reading books and don't eat my lunch and Take No Risks").

• He takes everything that he sees (or is told) at face value, and is unable to sort out the strange behaviour of his elders and peers.

• Late one night, Christopher comes across his neighbour's poodle, Wellington, impaled on a garden fork.

• Wellington's owner finds him cradling her dead dog in his arms, and has him arrested.

• After spending a night in jail, Christopher resolves--against the objection of his father and neighbours--to discover just who has murdered Wellington.

• He is encouraged by Siobhan, a social worker at his school, to write a book about his investigations, and the result--quirkily illustrated, with each chapter given its own prime number--is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

• As the mystery leads him to the secrets of his parents' broken marriage and then into an odyssey to find his place in the world, he must fall back on deductive logic to navigate the emotional complexities of a social world that remains a closed book to him.

• Christopher is too open-overwhelmed by sensations - does not have the filters through which normal people screen their surroundings.

• His literal-minded observations make his life difficult –

• "This will not be a funny book. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them," the novel brims with touching, ironic humor. The result is an eye-opening work in a unique and compelling literary voice.

• Beah's tale is a riveting snapshot of childhoods stolen from all too many, not just in Sierra Leone but in Somalia, Iraq, Palestine and other places ravaged by civil wars.

• This gripping story by a children's-rights advocate recounts his experiences as a boy growing up in Sierra Leone in the 1990s, during one of the most brutal and violent civil wars in recent history.

• But an abrupt change occurred a few years later when agents from the United Nations pulled him out of the army and placed him in a rehabilitation center.

• Eventually released by the army and sent to a UNICEF rehabilitation center, he struggled to regain his humanity and to reenter the world of civilians, who viewed him with fear and suspicion.

• This is, at last, a story of redemption and hope.

A Long Way Gone

• Beah's harrowing story of a boy caught up in the civil strife in Sierra Leone

• Beah, now twenty-six years old, tells a riveting story. At the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence.

• Beah, a boy equally thrilled by causing mischief as by memorizing passages from Shakespeare and dance moves from hip-hop videos, was a typical precocious 12-year-old.

• But rebel forces destroyed his childhood innocence when they hit his village, driving him to leave his home and travel the arid deserts and jungles of Africa.

• After several months of struggle, he was recruited by the national army, made a full soldier and learned to shoot an AK-47, and hated everyone who came up against the rebels.

• Beah's even-toned narrative is particularly disturbing because it's almost exactly the same whether he is enjoying the company of a newly found uncle or busy shooting and maiming rebels and even burying them alive.

• The first two thirds of his memoir are frightening: how easy it is for a normal boy to transform into someone as addicted to killing as he is to the cocaine that the army makes readily available.

• Beauty Sleep

• "LITTLE PRINCESS, LOVELY AS THE DAWN, WELL-NAMED AURORE..."

• With these seemingly innocent words, the fate of a newborn princess is sealed.

• For years the king and queen despaired of ever having a child. When Aurore arrives, though the entire kingdom celebrates

• Not everyone though is happy . One bitter woman curses the sleeping baby (Christening) and disappears

• Cursed at birth, Aurore is fated to prick her finger at the age of sixteen and sleep for one hundred years — until a prince awakens her with a kiss.

• So, to protect her, Aurore's loving parents forbid any task requiring a needle.

• Unable to sew or embroider like most little princesses, Aurore instead explores the castle grounds and beyond, where her warmth and generosity soon endear her to the townspeople.

• Their devotion to the spirited princess grows as she does.

• On her sixteenth birthday, Aurore learns that the impending curse will harm not only her, but the entire kingdom as well.

• Her godmother softens the curse, altering it so that Aurore will sleep one hundred years to be awakened by a kiss. Aurore, who has all the right royal instincts, grows up as a tomboy, working beside her subjects and winning their hearts.

• Unwilling to cause suffering, she will embark on a quest to end the evil magic.

• The princess's bravery will be rewarded as she finds adventure, enchantment, a handsome prince, and ultimately her destiny

• In her fateful sixteenth year, a blight spreads over the land, and Aurore decides she must save her kingdom from the effects of the curse by obeying a compulsion to run away to the magical and forbidden forest that borders her land.

• There she meets Ironheart, a young prince on a quest to find a sleeping princess and wake her up.

House of Scorpians

•Matteo Alcacran was not born : He was HARVESTED.

•His DNA came from El patron, the lord of a country called Opium – a strip of poppy fields, lying between the United Sates and what was once called Mexico.

•Matt’s first cell split and divided inside a Petri dish. Then he was placed in the womb of a cow where he continued the miraculous journey from embryo to fetus to baby.

•He is a boy now, but most consider him a monster – except for El Patron. El Patron loves Matt as he loves himself.

•Alacran, or El Patron, has lived 140 years with the help of transplants from a series of clones, a common practice among rich men in this world. The intelligence of clones is usually destroyed at birth, but Matt, the latest of Alacran's doubles, has been spared because he belongs to El Patron.

• He grows up in the family's mansion, alternately caged and despised as an animal and pampered and educated as El Patron's favorite.

• As Matt struggles to understand his existence, he threatened by El Patron’s power-hungry family and he is surrounded by a dangerous army of bodyguards.

• Gradually he realizes the fate that is in store for him, and with the help of Tam kind Scottish bodyguard, he escapes to Aztlan.

• There he and other "lost children" are trapped in a more subtle kind of slavery before Matt can return to Opium to take his rightful place and transform his country.

• Hits close to home, raising questions of what it means to be human

• What is the value of life, and what are the responsibilities of a society. Readers will be hooked from the first page, in which a scientist brings to life one of 36 tiny cells, frozen more than 100 years ago.

• Do Androids Sleep?• Phillip K. Dick• By 2021, the World War

had killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet.

• Those who remained coveted any living creature, and for people who couldn't afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacrae: horses, birds, cats, sheep. . . They even built humans.

• Emigrees to Mars received androids so sophisticated it was impossible to tell them from true men or women.

• Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans could wreak, the government banned them from Earth.

• But when androids didn't want to be identified, they just blended in.

• Rick Deckard was an officially sanctioned bounty hunter whose job was to find rogue androids, and to retire them. But cornered, androids tended to fight back, with deadly results.

Pick three books

List them on your sheet

Enjoy the Ride !

Read for fun!

Think and reflect as you read!