Battle of the Books List

As part of Camp Out @ The Library, children in grades 4 - 8 who enjoy reading for fun can participate in the Battle of the Book Reading Program this summer @ the main library and its seven branches. Teams of four to five students will read 10 books provided by the library. Once a week, the teams will compete against each other to see who can answer the most questions about the books.

Here are the titles included on the Battle of the Books List:

• Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech. After her mother leaves home suddenly, 13 year old Sal and her grandparents take a car trip retracing her mother's route. Along the way, Sal recounts the story of her friend Phoebe, whose mother also left.
  
  
• Riding Freedom by Pam Munoz Ryan. This book is a fictionalized account of Charlotte (Charley) Parkhurst. She pretended to be a boy when she ran away from an orphanage and lived her life as a boy and later as a man. Always hiding the fact that she was female, she made a life for herself working with horses, first as a stable hand, then as an expert coach-driver, and later, in California, where she found her own place at last. She voted 50 years before women were allowed to vote using her disguise as a man.
  
  
• Coffin on a Case by Eve Bunting. Twelve-year-old Henry Coffin, the son of a private investigator, helps a gorgeous high school girl in her dangerous attempt to find her kidnapped mother.
  
  
• Frindle by Andrew Clements. When he decides to turn his fifth grade teacher's love of the dictionary around on her, clever Nick Allen invents a new word and begins a chain of events that quickly moves beyond his control.
  
  
• Esperanza Rising by Pam Munoz Ryan. Esperanza and her mother are forced to leave their life of wealth and privilege in Mexico to go work in the labor camps of Southern California, where they must adapt to the harsh circumstances facing Mexican farm workers on the eve of the Great Depression.
  
  
• A Break with Charity: A Story About the Salem Witch Trials by Ann Rinaldi. While wating for a church meeting in 1706, Susanna English, daughter of a wealthy Salem merchant, recalls the malice, fear, and accusations of witchcraft that tore her village apart in 1692.
  
  
• Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis. Ten-year-old Bud, a motherless boy living in Flint, Michigan, during the Great Depression, escapes a bad foster home and set out in search of the man he believes to be his father - the renowned bandleader, H.e. Calloway of Grand Rapids.
  
  
• Holes by Louis Sachar. As further evidence of his family's bad fortune which they attribute to a curse on a distant relative, Stanley Yelnats is sent to a hellish correctional camp in the Texas desert where he finds his first real friend, a treasure, and a new sense of himself.
  
  
• Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli. In this story about the perils of popularity, the courage of nonconformity, and the thrill of first love, an eccentric student named Stargirl changes Mica High School forever.
  
  
• They Cage the Animals at Night by Jennings Michael Birch. Birch was left at an orphanage and never stayed at any foster home long enough to make friends. This is the story of how he grew up and gained the courage to reach out for love.