2023 Summer Reading: Grades 9 - 12 Book List

In 1924, eighteen-year-old college students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb made a decision- they would commit the perfect crime by kidnapping and murdering a child they both knew. But they made one crucial error- as they were disposing of the body of young Bobby Franks, Nathan's eyeglasses fell from his jacket pocket. This non-fiction book brings to heart-stopping life one of the most notorious crimes in our history.

James and Michelle find themselves in the Atlanta airport on a layover with seemingly endless delays. They are both drawn to a mysterious button that's flashing a green light. Once Michelle presses that button, impossible things start happening, like snowstorms inside the B terminal and ground splitting earthquakes. No matter how hard they try, it seems no one can find a way in or out of the airport. James and Michelle team up to find their families and put an end to this chaos, before it's too late.

In one week, Maude will be dead. At least, that's what she wants everyone to think. After years of research, Maude has decided to fake her own death. Then Frankie, a step-cousin she barely knows, figures out what she's plotting, and the plan seems like it's ruined. Except Frankie doesn't want to rat her out. Frankie wants in. The girls vault into the unknown, risking everything for a new and limitless life. But there are some things you can never run away from. What if the poison is not in the soil, but in the roots?

Bradley Graeme is a star football player and at the top of his class. His ex-best friend Celine Bangura is a conspiracy-theory-obsessed social media influencer. Yet, she's still not cool enough for the popular kids' table. They are both surprised when they find themselves in the same wilderness survival course. Forced to work as a team for the chance to win a grand prize, these two teens must trudge through not just mud and dirt but their messy past.

An outcast in her small Georgia town, Madison Washington has always been bullied. Things get worse when a surprise rainstorm reveals her secret: Maddy is biracial. She has been passing for white at the behest of her white father. After a viral bullying video showcases Springville Haigh's racist roots, student leaders come up with a plan to host the school's first integrated prom. A popular white class president convinces her Black quarterback boyfriend to ask Maddy to be his date. But some of her classmates aren't done with her quite yet.

Jax, Yas, Spider, and Han are the four members of Team Jericho, the best scavenger hunting team in all of Seattle. Each has their own specialty: Jax, the puzzler; Yas, the parkourist; Spider, the hacker; and Han, the cartographer. When The Order, a mysterious organization, hijacks the scavenger hunting forum and concocts a puzzle of its own, the promise a reward of influence. Team Jericho sees this reward as the chance of a lifetime since an oil refinery being build in their backyard has threatened their families' livelihood.

Asher Hunting wants revenge on the drunk driver who killed his mom and got off on a technicality. After attending a bereavement group, he makes some unexpected friends: there's Sloane and Will, who both lost a family member to cancer; and 80-year-old Henry, whose wife of fifty years decided to die on her own terms. It's these three who Asher invites on a road trip from New Jersey to Graceland. Asher doesn't tell them the real reason for his trip, but the other aren't exactly forthcoming either.

Ren has spent four years getting top marks at Balmerick University, which will mean nothing if she doesn't get recruited into one of the major houses. When a fight breaks out at a portal site the day before the holidays, the portal spell fails. All six students there are snatched from the safety of the school's campus and set down in the middle of nowhere. And one of them is dead on arrival. No magic could prepare of them for what's following them through these dark woods.

Eleanor is the last person in Salem to believe in witchcraft. After losing her best friend and first love, Chloe, Eleanor has spent the past year trying to move on. But when a handwritten guide to tarot arrives at the witchy shop where Eleanor works, it seems to bring with it the message that magic is about to enter her life. When real-life witch Pix shows up with an unusual invitation, Eleanor decides to open herself up to Pix's coven and even to the possibility of a new romance.

Gabriel, Reese, Sal, and Heath are best friends, bonded in their small rural town by their queerness, their good grades, and their big dreams. They are about to embark on the summer before senior year of high school, where each is going on a new, big adventure, from attending a design school in Paris to interning on Capitol Hill for a U.S. Senator. What will this summer of new experiences and world-expanding travel mean for each of them--and for their friendship?

FELICIA'S PICK: Seventeen-year-old Alice and her mother have spent most of Alice's life on the road, always a step ahead of the uncanny bad luck biting at their heels. But when Alice's grandmother, the reclusive author of a cult-classic book of pitch-dark fairy tales, dies alone on her estate, the Hazel Wood, Alice learns how bad her luck can really get.

KRISTY'S PICK: Seventeen-year-old Evie O'Neill is thrilled when she is exiled from small-town Ohio to New York City in 1926, even when a rash of occult-based murders thrusts Evie and her uncle, curator of The Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult, into the thick of the investigation.

KRISTY'S PICK: In a world where some people are born with extreme and often-feared skills called Graces, Katsa struggles for redemption from her own horrifying Grace, the Grace of killing, and teams up with another young fighter to save their land from a corrupt king.

CAITLYN'S PICK: It's 2002, a year after 9/11. It's an extremely turbulent time politically, but especially so for someone like Shirin, a sixteen-year-old Muslim girl who's tired of being stereotyped. Shirin is never surprised by how horrible people can be. She's built up protective walls and refuses to let anyone close enough to hurt her. But then she meets Ocean James. He's the first person in forever who really seems to want to get to know Shirin. It terrifies her--they seem to come from two irreconcilable worlds--and Shirin has had her guard up for so long that she's not sure she'll ever be able to let it down.

CAITLYN'S PICK: In an alternate America, princesses Beatrice and Samantha Washington and the two girls wooing their brother, Prince Jeffrey, become embroiled in high drama in the most glorious court in the world.

FELICIA'S PICK: An honors student at Jefferson Academy, seventeen-year-old Kiera enjoys developing and playing Slay, a secret, multiplayer online role-playing game celebrating black culture, until the two worlds collide.

LIZZY'S PICK: Lena looks forward to receiving the government-mandated cure that prevents the delirium of love and leads to a safe, predictable, and happy life, until ninety-five days before her eighteenth birthday and her treatment, she falls in love.

Hoodie Rosen's life isn't that bad. Sure, his entire Orthodox Jewish community has just picked up and moved to the quiet, mostly non-Jewish town of Tregaron, but Hoodie's world hasn't changed that much. When he meets and falls for Anna-Marie Diaz-O'Leary - daughter of the mayor trying to keep Hoodie's community out of the town, things only get more complicated when Tregaron is struck by a series of antisemitic crimes that quickly escalate to deadly violence. As his community turns on him for siding with the enemy, Hoodie finds himself caught between his first love and the only world he's ever known.

Harper Proulx is convinced that without knowing her anonymous sperm donor father, she can't know herself. When a chance Instagram post connects Harper to a half sibling, she joins her newfound half siblings on a voyage to Hawaii to face their father. The events of that summer, and the man they discover will force Harper to face some even bigger questions: Who is she? Is she her DNA, her experiences, her successes, her failures? Who she is in dark times? Who she might become after them?

When seventeen-year-old Avery moves to rural Georgia to live with her ailing grandmother, she encounters decade-old family secrets and a mystery surrounding the town's racist past.

As the King of England's illegitimate daughter, 17-year-old Evan Bright knows a thing or two about keeping secrets. But when she's forced to spend the summer in London with her father and the royal family, who aren't exactly thrilled she exists, her identity is mysteriously revealed, and suddenly the world is dying to know every juicy lie the press prints about her. After a fun night turns deadly and Evan becomes the primary suspect in a murder investigation, the escalating rumors and fallout threaten to tear her life apart.

Eighteen-year-old Spencer Sandoval goes to dangerous lengths to uncover the truth about a fatal car crash and its relation to her school's honor roll.
She can't remember anything from that night, not even what put her in that car with Ethan, Chris, and Tabby Hill, the new loner in school. Was it just a night out that went very wrong? And is it just a coincidence they were all part of Argyle's esteemed honor roll, the Headmaster's List? In a place ruled by pedigree and privilege, the answers can only come at a deadly price.

Alice Ogilvie's disappearance last summer is the biggest scandal at Castle Cove High School--until her ex-boyfriend is accused of murdering his new girlfriend, and Alice must pair up with her tutor Iris Adams to clear his name by relying on the wisdom of Agatha Christie.

By day Eustaquia "Kiki" de Sonza and Ana Lezama de Urinza are proper young seventeeth century ladies. When night falls, they trade in their silks and lace for swords and muskets, venturing out into the vibrant, bustling, crime-ridden streets of Potosí, in the Spanish Empire's Viceroyalty of Peru. On the night Kiki's engagement to the Viceroy's son is announced, her older brother-- heir to her family's fortune-- is murdered. The girls embark on a whirlwind investigation that takes them from the lowliest brothels of Potosí to the highest echelons of the Spanish aristocracy.

Kit Sutherland moves to Washington, DC, to work as a codebreaker at Arlington Hall, but when she stumbles onto a bloody homicide scene, she joins forces with other female codebreakers to find the person killing government girls.

Charlotte Kraus would follow her best friend, Angelika Haas, anywhere. Under the oppressive shadow of the Nazi regime, Charlie and Geli enjoy the thrill of disobeying the Party's rules. Soon the Swingjugend movement becomes a place where Charlie and her friends find acceptance, freedom, and camaraderie among others who are determined not to sit on the sidelines of history. Charlie is drawn to larger acts of resistance, even as Geli, the daughter of a senior Party officer, begins to pull away.

Eighteen-year-olds Cori and Maz, once inseparable best friends, reunite to solve the mystery of what happened to their other friend Sam--who disappeared five years ago and has now returned, not having aged at all.

Jay discovers that mountain resort where he lives and works with his friends and family is also a doomsday oasis for the rich and powerful who expect top-notch customer service even as the world outside the resort's walls disintegrates.

Seventeen-year-old bisexual Jade Nguyrn is spending the summer in Vietnam at the French colonial house her estranged father is fixing up as a vacation rental, but unbeknownst to her family, the house and its ghosts have other plans.