Book Recommendations for Summer Reading: Finding 'Good Fit' Books for Gifted Teens

Each reader is different, and not every reader is ready for the content they are able to read. That is the challenge of finding "good fit" books for advanced readers. These lists are just here to help you (and them) find some new books to read.

At each level, these are not all designed to be “challenge” books. Some are just strong middle-grade/YA fiction that students might enjoy reading or that a particular student may not have read yet. Students are—of course--welcome to seek a challenge on one of the older lists as well or to read a great book they’ve missed from an earlier recommended grade. Parents should advise re: content.

Also, the CCBC, an amazing children’s library resource out of the University of Wisconsin, has a
Web site full of lists. You can access their many recommendations here: https://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/books/detailLists.asp?idBookListCat=4

I have made three lists:
Books for rising 6th and 7th graders,
Books for rising 7th and 8th graders
Books for rising 8th and 9th graders.

Within the second two lists, I made subcategories with classics on top. Please excuse any duplicates.

Happy Reading!

P.S. I am going to add a few after reports are turned in. I have a "from this year" list that I don't want to forget to include.

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Rising 6th and 7th Graders
• The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
• Rain, Reign by Ann M. Martin
• Wonder by R.J. Palacio
• Half a Chance by Cynthia Lord
• Absolutely Almost by Lisa Graff
• Words with Wings by Nikki Grimes
• Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie by Jordan Sonnenblick
• Flora and Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo
• Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson
• Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson
• The White House is Burning by Jane Sutcliffe
• Paperboy by Vince Vawter
• The Call of the Wild
• Al Capone Does My ShirtsI by Gennifer Choldenko
• Better Nate Than Ever by Tim Federle
• Three Times Lucky by Sheila Turnage
• Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbit
• The Scarlet Pimpernel by Emmuska Orczy
• Refugee by Alan Gratz
• The Miracle Worker
• Anything by L’Engle
• Little Women
• The Once and Future King
• Surviving the Applewhites
• Watership Down
• Inherit the Wind
• Navigating Early
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
• Red Scarf Girl (a nonfiction memoir that reads like a story)
• The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
• The Alchemist
• Echo
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
• The House on Mango Street
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
• The Princess Bride
• A Wizard of Earthsea

Rising 7th and 8th Graders

Classics:
• Gulliver’s Travels
• The Iliad
• The Odyssey (I prefer the Fagles translation)
• Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography
• Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
• Bram Stoker’s Dracula
• Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre
• Austen’s Emma, Pride and Prejudice, and/or Sense and Sensibility
• Charles Dickens: The Old Curiosity Shop
• Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels
• The Joy Luck Club
• Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone (The first mystery novel)
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• P.G. Wodehouse (The Jeeves Stories)
• Agatha Christie’s mystery novels
• The James Bond novels
• John Le Carre’s spy novels

Newer Texts:
• The Flavia de Luce series of mystery novels (set in England, involve chemistry)
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith
• The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
• Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes  (and other Chris Crutcher novels—he’s from Spokane)
• The Fault in Our Stars
• Papertowns
• The Book Thief
• Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
• Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist (and everything else these co-authors wrote)
• Every Day by David Levithan
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
• The Highest Tide
• Life of Pi
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• The Martian Chronicles
• Ship Breaker
• Sophie’s World
• Bel Canto
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower
• Box Out
• Howl’s Moving Castle
• The Rock and the River
• Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
- My Name is Not Easy

-Hearts Unbroken

-The Beast of Cretacea

-Clap when You Land

-Almost American Girl

Nonfiction (Check the nonfiction list at the end of the rising 8/rising 9 list, too.)
• Port Chicago
• I Am Malala
• Samurai Rising
• Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?

Rising 8th and 9th Graders (Some of the content contained in these novels is a little edgier, so consider discussing options with parents. These are just great books, not necessarily great books for every student.)

Classics:
Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie
John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden
Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon
Herman Melville: Moby Dick
Ernest Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls
Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth
                        The Age of Innocence
Henry James: Daisy Miller and various short stories
Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead 
James Fenimore Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans (Or the whole set of the Leatherstocking Tales)
Richard Wright: Native Son
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Upton Sinclair: The Jungle
James Baldwin: Go Tell It on the Mountain
Frank Norris: The Octopus
Robert Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land
Alice Walker: The Color Purple
Willa Cather: My Antonia
Bernard Malamud: The Natural
Joseph Heller: Catch-22
Kurt Vonnegut: Cat’s Cradle
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Dorothy Dunnet’s The Lymond Chronicles (a series)
Herodotus’ Histories (460 B.C.)
The Peloponnesian Wars by Thucydides (431 B.C.)
Don Quixote (1605)
Wuthering Heights
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities
Les Miserables
Crime and Punishment
An American Tragedy
The Time Machine
Anything by Wilde, especially The Picture of Dorian Gray
Dubliners by James Joyce
Siddhartha
All Quiet on the Western Front
The Lord of the Rings
One Hundred Years of Solitude


Newer Works:
The Wide Sargasso Sea
The Hate U Give
On the Come Up
Elena Ferrante’s Novels
Exit West
Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Eva Luna
Speak
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Monkey Wrench Gang
The Magicians
Interpreter of Maladies (short stories)
A Separate Peace
The Night Circus
How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents
In the time of the Butterflies

Long Way Down
Ghost

Americanah

House of the Spirits

Purple Hibiscus
The Overstory

White Teeth

Nonfiction
The Physics of the Future
Plato at the Googleplex
Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?
The End of Money
Freakonomics
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Mountains Beyond Mountains
The Color of Water
Kaffir Boy
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