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Summer Reading

West Sound Reads: This summer the West Sound Academy community will have two ‘all-school’ required reads: Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy for Middle School and The Highest Tide for Upper School. Both books have beachside settings, but take place on opposite coasts!

Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, by Gary D. Schmidt, is based on an actual event that occurred in 1912 when the people of Phippsburg, Maine, evicted the African-American population of Malaga Island and had many of them placed in a mental institution. Turner Buckminster, the son of the new minister in a small Maine town, is shunned for playing baseball differently than the local boys. Then he befriends smart and lively Lizzie Bright Griffin, a girl from Malaga Island, a poor community founded by former slaves. Lizzie shows Turner a new world along the Maine coast, from digging clams to rowing a boat next to a whale. When the powerful town elders, including Turner’s father, decide to drive the people off the island to set up a tourist business, Turner stands alone against them. He and Lizzie try to save her community, but there’s a terrible price to pay for going against the rush to bring prosperity to Phippsburg.

The Highest Tide, by Jim Lynch, takes place in the tidal flats of south Puget Sound near Olympia. Miles O’Malley, thirteen-year-old beachcomber and budding marine biologist, spends his days quietly tending oyster beds and collecting marine life. His solitary life ends when he makes history by being the first to stumble upon a thirty-seven-foot beached giant squid and witness its dying breaths. The squid’s discovery galvanizes the community into a renewed interest in their surroundings The media, new age groups, religious sects, and scientists all converge upon Miles, declaring him their spiritual and intellectual guru. Faced with mounting pressures from family, friends, and strangers, Miles discovers that navigating the calm waters of Puget Sound is a lot easier than navigating the rocky terrain of young adulthood.

• Students will need to be prepared to discuss the required book for their grade on the first day of school. Rising 6th, 7th, and 8th graders read Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy; rising 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th graders read The Highest Tide.
  
  
• Jim Lynch, author of The Highest Tide, will come in September to speak to West Sound Academy students. Mr. Lynch will talk about how he became a writer, how he wrote The Highest Tide and “how researching the book was my own odyssey into getting acquainted with the tidal flats and the Puget Sound that I thought I already knew.”
  
  
• These books will serve as springboards for action. Faculty and students will plan and execute an all-school service project, perhaps one that helps with the protection of Puget Sound or our local watersheds.

Reading Choices: Students need to read two books from the Summer Reading Choices list for their grade (Middle School or Upper School.) Both lists have a mix of fiction and nonfiction books, recently published titles and classics, and a mix of genres.

Detailed descriptions of the books are given in the annotated “Summer Reading Choices" lists which are posted here:

Middle School Reading Choices List

Upper School Reading Choices List

• In September, students need to turn in a 2008 Reading Choices form to Susan Trower in the library, during the first week of school, indicating which two books were read, giving a brief description of each, along with parent’s initials. The form is available here.

Discussion Guides