WickedGirl's Book Notes

When food poisoning strikes an entire wedding party, the only two people who can use the honeymoon trip are the bride's sister and the groom's brother - who can't stand each other.

S.E. Hinton's 1967 novel - written while she was a junior in high school - opens on fourteen-year-old Ponyboy Curtis getting jumped on his way home from a movie in Tulsa, and walks the next several days through a fountain killing, a hideout in an abandoned country church, a fire that saves schoolchildren, a rumble between greasers and Socs, a Robert Frost poem, and one of the more devastating closing arcs in YA literature.

Two weeks after high school sophomore Hannah Baker kills herself, a shoebox arrives at Clay Jensen's house containing seven cassette tapes she recorded before she died - one side per person who contributed to the decision, thirteen reasons in all, with instructions to listen, pass them on, and not break the chain or the second set held by a watchful classmate gets released to the world.

Jack London's 1903 short novel: Buck, a 140-pound St. Bernard / Scotch Shepherd mix living the comfortable life on Judge Miller's California ranch, is stolen one night by a gambling-debt-saddled gardener's helper, sold into the Klondike Gold Rush as a sled dog, and slowly discovers - through cold, club, fang, and the man named John Thornton he comes to love - the wolf that has always been inside him.

George Orwell's 1945 fable: the animals of Manor Farm, inspired by an old prize boar named Major, rise up and drive out the drunk Mr. Jones, paint seven commandments on the barn wall, and over the next several years watch as two pigs - the idealist Snowball and the schemer Napoleon - turn the revolution into exactly the regime it was supposed to replace.

Aldous Huxley's 1932 dystopia of the World State - five castes grown in bottles, a population conditioned in its sleep to love its predetermined role, soma to manage anything that conditioning didn't reach - tested against an outsider named John, raised on a Reservation by a London Beta named Linda and brought back to a London where the freedom to suffer is the only freedom left to demand.