Live large with James Patterson's winning follow-up to the #1 New York Times bestseller Middle School, The Worst Years of My Life. After sixth grade, the very worst year of his life, Rafe Khatchadorian thinks he has it made in seventh grade. He's been accepted to art school in the big city and imagines a math-and-history-free fun zone. Wrong! It's more competitive than Rafe ever expected, and to score big in class, he needs to find a way to turn his boring life into the inspiration for a work of art. His method? Operation: Get a Life! Anything he's never done before, he's going to do it, from learning to play poker to going to a modern art museum. But when his newest mission uncovers secrets about the family Rafe's never known, he has to decide if he's ready to have his world turned upside down.
Paolo Antonio Livorati Books
This award-winning contemporary classic is the survival story with which all others are compared—and a page-turning, heart-stopping adventure, recipient of the Newbery Honor. Hatchet has also been nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read. Thirteen-year-old Brian Robeson, haunted by his secret knowledge of his mother’s infidelity, is traveling by single-engine plane to visit his father for the first time since the divorce. When the plane crashes, killing the pilot, the sole survivor is Brian. He is alone in the Canadian wilderness with nothing but his clothing, a tattered windbreaker, and the hatchet his mother had given him as a present. At first consumed by despair and self-pity, Brian slowly learns survival skills—how to make a shelter for himself, how to hunt and fish and forage for food, how to make a fire—and even finds the courage to start over from scratch when a tornado ravages his campsite. When Brian is finally rescued after fifty-four days in the wild, he emerges from his ordeal with new patience and maturity, and a greater understanding of himself and his parents.
In this dystopian world, books are replaced by mind-probes, unusable by narrator Spaz 15ish, because of the epilepsy he is named for. After the "Big Shake" apocalyptic earthquake fells "backtime" skyscrapers and civilization, Normals survive in the concrete-smog grey Urb by working for "cut your red" killer gang bosses. Sent to rob Ryter, the boy instead gains a mentor, "gummy" old mostly toothless writer, who guides their quest by the sun. Far away, where Spaz was banished for his illness, beloved unrelated younger sister Bean is dying.