5 books for the years that change everything

1

The Outsiders

by S.E. Hinton

S.E. Hinton was sixteen years old when she began writing The Outsiders, and eighteen when it was published in 1967. She wrote it because she was frustrated that the books assigned in her school had nothing to do with the world she actually lived in — one divided between kids who had everything and kids who had nothing, and the violence that erupted between them. The novel follows Ponyboy Curtis, a Greaser on the wrong side of town, through a week that will change everything. It is one of the most widely read novels in American middle schools for a simple reason: students recognize it. The names and clothes have changed. The divisions have not.

Gallant — Brave, heroic, and noble — especially in the face of danger or difficulty

“He was gallant — that was the only word for it. A young man in a strange town, far from home, scared, but still managing to be kind.”

2

The House on Mango Street

by Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros published The House on Mango Street in 1984, and it has been taught in American classrooms ever since — not because it is comforting, but because it is exact. Esperanza Cordero is a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, narrating her world in a series of vignettes so precise and so lyrical that they read like prose poems. She watches the women around her and understands, very early, what the neighborhood expects of them. She has already decided she will not comply. Cisneros invented a form for this book — not quite a novel, not quite a short story collection — because no existing form was adequate to contain what she needed to say. Students who read it learn something important: that form is never accidental.

Tenement — A rundown apartment building in a poor area of a city

“We didn't always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, and before that I can't remember. But what I remember most is moving a lot. Each time it seemed there'd be one more of us. By the time we got to Mango Street we were six — Mama, Papa, Carlos, Kiki, my sister Nenny and me. The house on Mango Street is ours, and we don't have to pay rent to anybody, or share the yard with the people downstairs, or be careful not to make too much noise, and there isn't a landlord banging on the ceiling with a broom. But even so, it's not the house we thought we'd get.”

3

Esperanza Rising

by Pam Muñoz Ryan

Pam Muñoz Ryan based Esperanza Rising on the life of her own grandmother, and published it in 2000. It follows Esperanza Ortega, the privileged daughter of a Mexican landowner, whose world collapses overnight when her father is murdered and she is forced to flee to California with her mother, where they will work in the agricultural labor camps of the 1930s. Ryan structures the novel around the seasons of harvest — grapes, figs, almonds, potatoes — and the rhythm of that structure gives the book its quiet power. This is a novel about what survives when everything else is taken away. The answer, Ryan suggests, is more than most people expect.

Resilience — The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness in the face of hardship

“She was a river, carrying the silt of her life and her losses, but still flowing. That resilience — that refusal to be stopped — was the only inheritance left to give.”

4

Ghost

by Jason Reynolds

Jason Reynolds published Ghost in 2016 as the first book in his Track series, and it found its way into classrooms almost immediately. Castle Crenshaw — Ghost — has been running his whole life, first from his father, who threatened him and his mother with a gun when Ghost was eight years old, and then from everything that memory left behind. When he stumbles into a track practice and a coach sees something in him, Ghost has to decide whether he is willing to stop running away and start running toward something. Reynolds writes the way teenagers actually think — in rhythm, in fragments, in flashes of humor that make the grief land harder. Teachers assign this book because students who claim they don't like reading finish it.

Redemption — The action of being saved from error, failure, or a difficult situation

“I just wanted to feel like I had a chance at redemption, even if I didn't deserve one.”

5

The Giver

by Lois Lowry

What if pain could be removed from the world? What if someone had to hold it for everyone else? Lois Lowry asks this question quietly, and the answer she builds is unforgettable. The Giver is a small book. It carries enormous weight.

precision — the quality of being exact, accurate, and carefully defined — leaving no room for ambiguity or individual interpretation

“"The Community, of course, could not function if people did not speak with precision... It was not a lie. Precision of language was one of the most important things."”