Middle School Reads!

by Ashley Herring Blake Lexile:  740 Genre:  Realistic Fiction Ivy Aberdeen and her family just lost everything, except each other.  A tornado roared through their family home early one morning and now nothing is the same.  Ivy loves to express herself through her drawings and now even her notebook and special drawing brushes are gone.  But then Ivy starts to receive pages from her notebook in her locker at school.  Who has her personal drawings?  And who is the person that knows Ivy's most private secrets?  Life is so confusing for Ivy right now as her family tries to get back on their feet and as Ivy tries to figure out who she is and what her place in the world should be.

by John David Anderson Lexile:  750 Genre:  Realistic Fiction Life has just changed for the students at Branton Middle School.  Administration just announced that cell phones are now completely banned from the school.  The students decide this is very unfair and resort to using post it notes to communicate the information they previously did by texting.  For Wolf, Bench, Deedee and Frost, this poses some new challenges, but basically the foursome is continuing to survive middle school just fine.  Until a new girl, Rose, arrives at their school and decides to join them at their private lunch table.  It is clear that Rose is unlike anyone they have ever met before and are unprepared for what her addition to their group will mean.  At the same time, the post-it note craze is getting out of hand.  What will school administration do to reign the students back under control?  Nobody ever said that surviving middle school was easy...                                      

by Alan Gratz Lexile:  800 Genre:  Historical Fiction, Realistic Fiction Josef and his family are trying to escape the Nazis by traveling from Germany to Cuba in 1933.  Isabel and her family are trying to escape Castro by traveling from Cuba to the United States in 1994.  Mahmoud and his family are trying to escape the war in Syria and are traveling to Germany in 2105.  All 3 are refugees at different times in history and all 3 face overwhelming obstacles in their quests to find freedom.  From Germany in 1933 to Germany in 2015, this is the story of 3 families whose stories overlap and intersect in a surprising way.

by Lisa Bunker Lexile:  940 Genre: Science Fiction Felix is not your average middle schooler.  When he was 3, an accident happened that left him meshed together with an alien being.  Xyz lives inside of Felix and communicates with him through typing on the computer.  Felix doesn't remember life without xyz, but now doctors have determined that in order for one or both of them to survive, they will need to be separated.  Felix is getting nervous as the day for The Procedure approaches and if that wasn't enough, he is struggling with getting to know his mom's new boyfriend and figuring out new friendships at school.  What will life be like without xyz , if Felix survives?