Senior School Summer Reading List 2020

Senior School Summer Reading List 2020

     The Hate You Give
     Angie Thomas
     Published 2017

     Starr Carter is constantly switching between two worlds -- the
     poor, mostly black neighborhood where she lives and the wealthy,
     mostly white prep school that she attends. The uneasy balance
     between these worlds is soon shattered when she witnesses the
     fatal shooting of her childhood best friend at the hands of a police
     officer. Facing pressure from all sides of the community, Starr
     must find her voice and decide to stand up for what's right.

     The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power
     Desmond Cole
     Published 2020

     Puncturing the bubble of Canadian smugness and naive
     assumptions of a post-racial nation, Cole chronicles just one
     year—2017—in the struggle against racism in this country. It was
     a year that saw calls for tighter borders when Black refugees
     braved frigid temperatures to cross into Manitoba from the States,
     Indigenous land and water protectors resisting the celebration of
     Canada’s 150th birthday, police across the country rallying
     around an officer accused of murder, and more.

     Indian Horse
     Richard Wagamese
     Published 2012

     Saul Indian Horse has hit bottom. His last binge almost killed him,
     and now he’s a reluctant resident in a treatment centre for
     alcoholics, surrounded by people he’s sure will never understand
     him. But Saul wants peace, and he grudgingly comes to see that
     he’ll find it only through telling his story. With him, readers embark
     on a journey back through the life he’s led as a northern Ojibway,
     with all its joys and sorrows.

Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
Published 1958

Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically
acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's
cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence
on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a
wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things
Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his
Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as
his community capitulates to the powerful new order.

Washington Black
Esi Edugyan
Published 2018

Washington Black is an eleven-year-old field slave who knows no
other life than the Barbados sugar plantation where he was born.

When his master's eccentric brother chooses him to be his
manservant, Wash is terrified of the cruelties he is certain await
him. But Christopher Wilde, or "Titch," is a naturalist, explorer,
scientist, inventor, and abolitionist.

The Fifth Season
N. K. Jemisin
Published 2015

This is the way the world ends. Again.

Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, a woman
living an ordinary life in a small town, comes home to find that her
husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their
daughter. Meanwhile, mighty Sanze -- the world-spanning empire
whose innovations have been civilization's bedrock for a thousand
years -- collapses as most of its citizens are murdered to serve a
madman's vengeance. And worst of all, across the heart of the
vast continent known as the Stillness, a great red rift has been
been torn into the heart of the earth, spewing ash enough to
darken the sky for years. Or centuries.

A Lesson Before Dying
Ernest J. Gaines
Published 1993

A Lesson Before Dying is set in a small Cajun community in the
late 1940s. Jefferson, a young black man, is an unwitting party to
a liquor store shoot out in which three men are killed; the only
survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Grant
Wiggins, who left his hometown for the university, has returned to
the plantation school to teach. As he struggles with his decision
whether to stay or escape to another state, his aunt and
Jefferson's godmother persuade him to visit Jefferson in his cell
and impart his learning and his pride to Jefferson before his
death. In the end, the two men forge a bond as they both come to
understand the simple heroism of resisting and defying the
expected. Ernest J. Gaines brings to this novel the same rich
sense of place, the same deep understanding of the human
psyche, and the same compassion for a people and their struggle
that have informed his previous, highly praised works of fiction.

White Teeth
Zadie Smith
Published 2000

At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends,
Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II,
Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s
irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden,
a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite
literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a
knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name
(Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged
marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin
sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct
them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith.
Set against London’s racial and cultural tapestry, venturing across
the former empire and into the past as it barrels toward the
future, White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern
life, flirting with disaster, confounding expectations, and
embracing the comedy of daily existence.

Small Island
Andrea Levy
Published 2004

Hortense Joseph arrives in London from Jamaica in 1948 with her
life in her suitcase, her heart broken, her resolve intact. Her
husband, Gilbert Joseph, returns from the war expecting to be
received as a hero, but finds his status as a black man in Britain
to be second class. His white landlady, Queenie, raised as a
farmer's daughter, befriends Gilbert, and later Hortense, with
innocence and courage, until the unexpected arrival of her
husband, Bernard, who returns from combat with issues of his
own to resolve.

The Book of Negroes
Lawrence Hill
Published 2007

Based on a true story, "The Book of Negroes" tells the story of
Aminata, a young girl abducted from her village in Mali aged 11 in
1755, and who, after a deathly journey on a slave ship where she
witnesses the brutal repression of a slave revolt, is sold to a
plantation owner in South Carolina, who rapes her. She is brought
to New York, where she escapes her owner, and finds herself
helping the British by recording all the freed slaves on the British
side in the Revolutionary War in The Book of Negroes (a real
historical document that can be found today at the National
Archives at Kew).Aminata is sent to Nova Scotia to start a new
life, but finds more hostility, oppression and tragedy. Separated
from her one true love, and suffering the unimaginable loss of
both her children who are taken away from her, she eventually
joins a group of freed slaves on a harrowing odyssey back to
Africa, and ends up in London as a living icon for Wilberforce and
the other Abolitionists. "The Book of Negroes" is a pageturning
narrative that manages to use Aminata's heart-rending personal
story to bring to life a harrowing chapter in our history.

Behold The Dreamers
Imbolo Mbue
Published 2016

Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has
come to the United States to provide a better life for himself, his
wife, Neni, and their six-year-old son. In the fall of 2007, Jende
can hardly believe his luck when he lands a job as a chauffeur for
Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Clark
demands punctuality, discretion, and loyalty—and Jende is eager
to please. Clark’s wife, Cindy, even offers Neni temporary work at
the Edwardses’ summer home in the Hamptons. With these
opportunities, Jende and Neni can at last gain a foothold in
America and imagine a brighter future.

White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk
About Racism
Robin DiAngelo
Published 2018

In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson),
antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the
phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand
racism as a practice not restricted to 'bad people'" (Claudia
Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people
make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by
emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt and by behaviors
including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn,
function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any
meaningful cross-racial dialogue.

The Underground Railroad
Colson Whitehead
Published 2016

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all
the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among
her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even
greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia,
tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a
terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora
kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they
manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

Song of Solomon
         Toni Morrison
         Published 1977

         Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric
         hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest
         of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined
         novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as
         audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she
         follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s
         origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and
         seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized
         black world.

         The Bluest Eye
         Toni Morrison
         Published 1970

         The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel, a book heralded for
         its richness of language and boldness of vision. Set in the author's
         girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black,
         eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to
         turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the
         blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the
         year the marigolds in the Breedloves' garden do not bloom.
         Pecola's life does change- in painful, devastating ways.
         What its vivid evocation of the fear and loneliness at the heart of a
         child's yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. The Bluest
         Eye remains one of Toni Morrisons's most powerful, unforgettable
         novels- and a significant work of American fiction.

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