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Mexico, the late 1930s: A paramilitary group has outlawed the Catholic Church and been executing its clergy. Now the last priest is on the run, fleeing not just an unshakable police lieutenant but also his own wavering morals. As he scraps his way toward salvation, haunted by an affair from his past, the nameless "whiskey priest" is pulled between the bottle and the Bible, tempted to renounce his religion yet unable to ignore the higher calling he's...
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This tragic love story reveals the destructive effects of wealth and social hypocrisy on Lily Bart, a ravishing beauty. Impoverished but well-born, Lily realizes a secure future depends on her acquiring a wealthy husband. Her downfall begins with a romantic indiscretion, intensifies with an accumulation of gambling debts, and climaxes in a maelstrom of social disasters.
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Emily Dickinson lived as a recluse in Amherst, Massachusetts, dedicating herself to writing a "letter to the world"—the 1,775 poems left unpublished at her death in 1886. Today, Dickinson stands in the front rank of American poets. This enthralling collection includes more than four hundred poems that were published between Dickinson's death and 1900. They express her concepts of life and death, of love and nature, and of what Henry James...
5) The pearl
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"For the diver Kino, finding a magnificent pearl means the promise of better life for his impoverished family. His dream blinds him to the greed and suspicions the pearl arouses in him and his neighbors, and even his loving wife cannot temper his obsession or stem the events leading to tragedy. Kino and his wife illustrate the fall from innocence of people who believe that wealth erases all problems" -- P. 4 of cover.
7) Desert gold
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"A border town like Casita is no place for a drifter - especially a rich man's son looking for adventure. From the moment Dick Gale steps into this stinking, sun-baked hellhole of gambling and corruption, revolution, and revenge, he gets more than a bargained for. His old friend Thorne is in love with a beautiful senorita who's been targeted by the Mexican rebel Rojas. A bold, sneering devil of a man, feared, envied, and idolized by his people, Rojas...
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Western stories. Cottonwoods, Utah. 1871. A woman stands accused. A man, sentenced to whipping. Into this travesty of small-town justice rides the one man the town elders fear. His name is Lassiter, a notorious gunman who's come to avenge his sister's death. It doesn't take Lassiter long to see that this once-peaceful Mormon community is controlled by the corrupt Deacon Tull-a powerful elder who's trying to take the woman's land by forcing her to...
9) Passing
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"Nella Larsen's second novel, Passing, first published in 1929, is a fascinating exploration of race and identity set amidst the blossoming Harlem Renaissance. Irene Redfield is a Black woman living an affluent, comfortable life with her husband and children in the thriving neighborhood of Harlem in the 1920s. When she reconnects with her childhood friend Clare Kendry, who is similarly light-skinned, Irene discovers that Clare has been passing for...
10) White Fang
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Born in the wilds of the freezing cold Yukon, the wolf cub White Fang soon learns the harsh laws of nature, growing fiercer and more independent in his struggle to survive. Yet buried deep inside him are distant memories of affection and love. Can he learn to trust man again?
11) A tramp abroad
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In A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain's unofficial sequel to The Innocents Abroad, the author records his hilarious and diverse observations and insights while on a fifteen-month walking trip through Central Europe and the Alps.
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Great excitement and awe greeted its publication in 1873, and today Around the World in Eighty Days remains Jules Verne's most successful novel. A daring wager by the eccentric and mysterious Englishman Phileas Fogg that he can circle the globe in just eighty days initiates this marvelous travelogue and exciting suspense story. Together with his manservant, Passepartout, Fogg makes a breathless world tour, overcoming wild misadventures and finding...
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The adventures of a boy and a runaway slave as they travel down the Mississippi River on a raft. Originally intended as a sequel to his immensely popular Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn stands on its own as one of America's most important and beloved literary classics. For generations, young and old alike have delighted in the unforgettable adventures of runaways Huck Finn and Jim, a slave. In vivid, often gripping...
14) The sea - wolf
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Jack London's 1904 novel "The Sea Wolf" is the story of Humphrey van Weyden, an effete gentleman who finds himself shipwrecked when the San Francisco ferry his is aboard collides with another ship in the fog. Adrift in the bay, Humphrey is rescued by Wolf Larsen, the brutish captain of a seal-hunting schooner, the "Ghost". However his relief in being saved is short-lived, for he is soon put to work, essentially enslaved as a cabin boy forced to do...
15) The jungle
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In this powerful book we enter the world of Jurgis Rudkus, a young Lithuanian immigrant who arrives in America fired with dreams of wealth, freedom, and opportunity. And we discover, with him, the astonishing truth about "packingtown," the busy, flourishing, filthy Chicago stockyards, where new world visions perish in a jungle of human suffering. Upton Sinclair, master of the "muckraking" novel, here explores the workingman's lot at the turn of the...
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"Few have failed to be charmed by the witty and independent spirit of Elizabeth Bennet in [this] Austen's beloved classic. When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to...
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Appears on these lists
Black History - Children's Fiction
Classics - Middle Grade Books
Historical Fiction - Middle Grade Books
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Classics - Middle Grade Books
Historical Fiction - Middle Grade Books
More Lists...
Description
With the land to hold them together, nothing can tear the Logans apart. Why is the land so important to Cassie's family? It takes the events of one turbulent year -- the year of the night riders and the burnings, the year a white girl humiliates Cassie in public simply because she is black -- to show Cassie that having a place of their own is the Logan family's lifeblood. It is the land that gives the Logans their courage and pride, for no matter...
18) O, pioneers!
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When Alexandra Bergson, the daughter of Swedish immigrants, takes over the family farm after her father's death, she falls under the spell of the rich, forbidding Nebraska prairie. With strength and resoluteness, she turns the wild landscape into orderly fields.
19) Robinson Crusoe
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Contemporary fiction. 'I walk'd about on the shore, lifting up my hands, and my whole being, as I may say, wrapt up in the contemplation of my deliverance . . . reflecting upon all my comrades that were drown'd, and that there should not be one soul sav'd but my self . . . ' Who has not dreamed of life on an exotic isle, far away from civilization? Here is the novel which has inspired countless imitations by lesser writers, none of which equal the...
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Based on a motion picture to be released in theaters Dec. 14, 2012, this is the story of Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit who lives in a hole in the ground and accompanies Thorin Oakenshield and his band of dwarves on a quest to recover the gold stolen from them by the evil dragon Smaug. At journey's end, after facing trolls, goblins, giant spiders, and worse, Bilbo discovers his destiny.