Identity
High school is where the question stops being abstract. These five books follow characters who are forced — by circumstance, by loss, by love, by the world — to decide who they are and what they will not compromise. Each one is a different answer to the same question.
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J.D. Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, and it has been argued about ever since. Holden Caulfield is sixteen years old, recently expelled from his fourth school, wandering New York City over the course of a few days in December. He is funny, perceptive, exhausting, and occasionally unbearable — which is to say, he is a precise portrait of a certain kind of adolescent intelligence that has not yet found a way to live in the world. The novel has been banned more times than almost any other in American schools, which is itself a lesson worth teaching: what does it mean that a book about a boy who cannot stand phoniness makes so many adults uncomfortable?
Alienation — The state of being isolated from a group or activity to which one should belong
“I felt so lonesome, all of a sudden. I almost wished I was dead. That's a terrible thing to say, but I did. The alienation was total — from everyone, from everything, from myself most of all.”
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Jane Eyre doesn't just survive — she refuses, resists, and insists on her own terms. Students don't forget her.
Resolute — Admirably purposeful, determined, and unwavering
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
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Zora Neale Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937, and it was largely ignored for decades before Alice Walker helped restore it to the canon in the 1970s. Set in the all-Black town of Eatonville, Florida, it follows Janie Crawford across three marriages and into a fully realized self. Hurston was an anthropologist as well as a novelist, and her prose carries the rhythms and textures of the oral tradition she spent her career documenting. The dialect is not an obstacle — it is the point. Students who learn to hear it are learning something essential about how language carries culture, identity, and history in the same breath.
Horizon — The line at which the earth meets the sky — and in Hurston, a symbol of possibility and self-determination
“Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”
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Khaled Hosseini published The Kite Runner in 2003, and it became one of the most widely read novels of the decade. Amir grows up privileged in Kabul, the son of a wealthy Pashtun, his closest companion a Hazara boy named Hassan who is devoted to him with a loyalty Amir will not deserve. When something terrible happens and Amir fails Hassan at the moment that matters most, the guilt follows him across decades and continents — from Kabul to California and back again. Hosseini is not a subtle writer, but he is a precise one. The novel earns every emotion it asks of its readers because it never asks for more than the story can support.
Atonement — Reparation for a wrong or injury; making amends for guilt or wrongdoing
“I thought about Hassan's harelip. I thought about that winter day in 1975. I thought about the life I had lived until a phone call from a man I hadn't heard from in fifteen years had made me see that atonement was still possible.”
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John Knowles published A Separate Peace in 1959, and it has never quite received the recognition it deserves — which is strange, because it is one of the most precise novels ever written about the inner life of a teenage boy. Set at a New England boarding school during World War II, it follows Gene Forrester and his best friend Phineas through a summer that ends in a moment Gene will spend the rest of his life trying to understand. The war is distant. The real conflict is interior — and far more dangerous. Students who read it tend to go very quiet afterward. That silence is the novel working.
Enmity — A state of deep-seated ill will and hostility between people
“Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence. Changed, I headed back through the effects of the gale, thinking that this was the way it would be from now on.”