Freedom to Read Week 2024

At New York City's Central Park Zoo, two male penguins fall in love and start a family by taking turns sitting on an abandoned egg until it hatches.

Lives of Girls and Women is the intensely readable, touching, and very funny story of Del Jordan, a young woman who journeys from the carelessness of childhood through an uneasy adolescence in search of love and sexual experience.

As Del dreams of becoming famous, suffers embarrassment about her mother, endures the humiliation of her body's insistent desires, and tries desperately to fall in love, she grapples with the crises that mark the

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The eighth book in the #1 New York Times bestselling Princess Diaries series by Meg Cabot.

At last, Mia is a junior. An upperclassperson. So why is it that everything is going so terribly wrong? What is she doing in Intro to Creative Writing? When she has made it through Algebra and Geometry, why must she be faced with Precalculus? All this is nothing compared to the news Michael springs on her, however. Her beloved boyfriend

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A controversial tale of friendship and tragedy during the Great Depression
A Penguin Classic
Over seventy-five years since its first publication, Steinbeck’s tale of commitment, loneliness, hope, and loss remains one of America’s most widely read and taught novels. An unlikely pair, George and Lennie, two migrant workers in California during the Great Depression, grasp for their American Dream. They hustle work when they...

Accompanied by her daemon, Lyra Belacqua sets out to prevent her best friend and other kidnapped children from becoming the subject of gruesome experiments in the Far North.

Take a little Horror home with you! Sam Waters desperately wants a pet. Too bad his parents don't think he's responsible enough and will barely let him keep the weird Insta-Gro animal from the HorrorLand gift shop. To prove he's responsible, Sam takes an after-school job in a pet store that sells nothing but hamsters. To his horror, Sam soon finds that cute little hamsters can become very UNCUTE monsters. Suddenly, Sam isn't fighting for a pet-he's...

"Pecola Breedlove, a young eleven-year-old black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dreams grow more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity."--from...

The 40th anniversary edition of the classic Newbery Medal-winning title by beloved author Katherine Paterson, with brand-new bonus materials including an author's note by Katherine herself and a foreword by New York Times bestselling author Kate DiCamillo.

Jess Aarons has been practicing all summer so he can be the fastest runner in the fifth grade. And he almost is, until the new girl in

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Nobody Owens is a normal boy, except that he has been raised by ghosts and other denizens of the graveyard, in which he must remain in order to stay safe.