John Steinbeck
1) East of Eden
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.3 - AR Pts: 34
Description
This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families--the Trasks' and the Hamilton's--whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. The story of two brothers, Aron is a clean-cut model student, engaged to be married, the pride of his hardworking father. Cal is a rebellious loner, sternly rejected...
3) Cannery Row
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6 - AR Pts: 8
Formats
Description
Recounts the adventures and misadventures of cannery workers living in the run-down waterfront section of Monterey, California.
Author
Series
A Bantam book volume N3623
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.4 - AR Pts: 13
Description
From the Publisher: From a swashbuckling pirate fantasy to a meditation on American morality-two classic Steinbeck novels make their black spine debuts. In awarding John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with The Winter of Our Discontent, he had "resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American." Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist...
6) The Red Pony
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.1 - AR Pts: 6
Formats
Description
The moving and beautiful story of a boy, a sorrel colt and the sun-drenched California earth." Junius Maltby: After ten years as a San Francisco accountant, Junius moves to sunny Pastures of Heaven, marries, has a son and becomes poverty stricken through laziness. When he realizes he is hurting his son, he has to make a decision.
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.5 - AR Pts: 14
Formats
Description
In the California apple country, nine hundred migratory workers rise up "in dubious battle" against the landowners. The group takes on a life of its own-stonger than its individual members and more frightening. led by the doomed Jim Nolan, the strike is founded on his tragic idealism-on the "courage never to submit or yield."
12) The moon is down
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.1 - AR Pts: 5
Description
In an unnamed country (similar to Norway) during World War II, a German sympathizer lures local men and the town's twelve soldiers into the forest long enough for the Germans to take the town. They occupy the home of the mayor as a sign of their power and commandeer the local coal mine. Mayor Orden has never before been a brave or very forceful man, but he is not a fool, and while he tries to keep order in the town, as the Germans demand, he refuses...
13) The Pearl
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.1 - AR Pts: 4
Description
"For the diver Kino, finding a magnificent pearl means the promise of a better life for his impoverished family. His dreams blind him to the greed that the pearl arouses in him and his neighbors. Baring the fallacy of the American dream-that wealth erases all problems-Steinbeck's classic illustrates our fall from innocence."--Pub.desc.
14) To a God unknown
Author
Pub. Date
1995
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.8 - AR Pts: 12
Description
On his new ranch in California, Joseph Wayne sees a huge tree as the symbol of his father's spirit. But then one of his brothers, terrified by Joseph's pagan beliefs, kills the tree...
18) Hurt you
Author
Formats
Description
"Moving beyond the quasi-fraternal bond of the unforgettable George and Lenny from Of Mice and Men, Hurt You explores the actual sibling bond of Georgia and Leonardo da Vinci Daewoo Kim, who has an unnamed neurological disability that resembles autism. The themes of race, disability, and class spin themselves out in a suburban high school where the Kim family has moved in order to access better services for Leonardo. Suddenly unmoored from the familiar,...
19) La perla
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.1 - AR Pts: 4
Description
The story of a simple pearl fisherman and his family and how their lives are forever altered by the discovery of a giant pearl.