1. 1st quarter memoir choices
English 9, Miss Luedders

2. You will be choosing 1 of the novels below to read this quarter in addition to your independent novel

3. How will I choose my novel?
After I’ve introduced all of the choices, we will draw #s and come up in the order you’ve drawn.
Just in case your 1st choice is already gone, have a 2nd choice in mind

4. PERSEPOLIS By: Marjane Satrapi
At the opening of the book, Marjane, or 'Marji,' is ten years old. It's the year after the Iranian Revolution and although her family has always been secular, Marji must wear a veil and attend a religious, girls-only school. She gives us a child's-eye view of the country's history, from its glorious past as the Persian city of Persepolis to the tumultuous events leading up to the present moment. Gradually, her family helps her make sense of what's going on around her. Violence is a daily event as protests fill the streets. During all this, Marji tries to be a normal teenager. She likes punk music and American clothes, but she frightens her parents when she buys them on the black market. Increasingly worried by Marji's rebellious behavior, her parents announce that Marji will be moving to Austria to attend a new school -- by herself. European ways sometimes puzzle Marji, who has a hard time understanding why teenagers disrespect their parents, or talk so much about sex. All the while, Marji is developing into a young woman, and she begins experimenting with sex and selling drugs. Her boyfriend Markus cheats on her, and in desperation, Marji begins living on the streets. Finally, she reconnects with her parents, who arrange for her to come home. Once more, Marji must create a new life. Her friends have found ways to adjust to the new regime, but Marji no longer fits in. She becomes an aerobics instructor, and starts dating Reza. She also enrolls in art school. During this period, Marji and Reza have several run-ins with the moral police, who have the authority to whip or fine them for being seen together out of wedlock. They marry, but their relationship is not a happy one and they decide to divorce. Marji realizes that she must leave home in order to find the life she wants.

5. INTEREVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR ABOUT THE BOOK

6. NIGHT By: Elie Wiesel
At the beginning of Night, Wiesel introduces someone he met toward the end of His name was Moshe, and he became one of the boy’s teachers. Later, the Hungarian police deported Moshe from Sighet, Wiesel’s hometown, because he was a foreigner. His destination was Poland and death at the hands of the Germans, but somehow Moshe escaped and found his way back to Sighet. The Jews of Sighet did not believe his tale of destruction. Although the Holocaust was raging all around them, the Hungarian Jews were not decimated until Their lives began to change drastically, however, once the Germans occupied Hungary that March. The Jews of Sighet—Elie Wiesel, his little sister, Tzipora, and their parents among them—eventually crossed the Polish frontier and arrived at Auschwitz- Birkenau. Spared the fate of Wiesel’s mother and sister, they were not “selected” for the gas chambers but for slave labor instead. From late May, 1944, until mid-January, 1945, Wiesel and his father endured Auschwitz’s brutal regimen. Night covers in detail these events

7. INTERVEW WITH THE AUTHOR ABOUT THE BOOK

8. SOLD By: Patricia McCormick
Lakshmi is a thirteen-year-old girl who lives with her family in a small hut in the mountains of Nepal. Her family is desperately poor, but her life is full of simple pleasures, like raising her black-and-white speckled goat, and having her mother brush her hair by the light of an oil lamp. But when the harsh Himalayan monsoons wash away all that remains of the family’s crops, Lakshmi’s stepfather says she must leave home and take a job to support her family. He introduces her to a glamorous stranger who tells her she will find her a job as a maid working for a wealthy woman in the city. Glad to be able to help, Lakshmi undertakes the long journey to India and arrives at “Happiness House” full of hope. But she soon learns the unthinkable truth: she has been sold into prostitution. An old woman named Mumtaz rules the brothel with cruelty and cunning. She tells Lakshmi that she is trapped there until she can pay off her family’s debt – then cheats Lakshmi of her meager earnings so that she can never leave. Lakshmi’s life becomes a nightmare from which she cannot escape. Still, she lives by her mother’s words – “Simply to endure is to triumph” – and gradually, she forms friendships with the other girls that enable her to survive in this terrifying new world. Then the day comes when she must make a decision – will she risk everything for a chance to reclaim her life?

9. INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR ABOUT THE BOOK

10. FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER By: Loung Ung
In 1975, Ung, now the national spokesperson for the Campaign for a Landmine-Free World, was the five-year-old child of a large, affluent family living in Phnom Penh, the cosmopolitan Cambodian capital. As extraordinarily well-educated Chinese-Cambodians, with the father a government agent, her family was in great danger when the Khmer Rouge took over the country and throughout Pol Pot's barbaric regime. Her parents' strength and her father's knowledge of Khmer Rouge ideology enabled the family to survive together for a while, posing as illiterate peasants, moving first between villages, and then from one work camp to another. The father was honest with the children, explaining dangers and how to avoid them, and this, along with clear sight, intelligence and the pragmatism of a young child, helped Ung to survive the war. Her restrained, unsentimental account of the four years she spent surviving the regime before escaping with a brother to Thailand and eventually the United States is astonishing--not just because of the tragedies, but also because of the immense love for her family that Ung holds onto, no matter how she is brutalized. She describes the physical devastation she is surrounded by but always returns to her memories and hopes for those she loves. Her joyful memories of life in Phnom Penh are close even as she is being trained as a child soldier, and as, one after another, both parents and two of her six siblings are murdered in the camps. Skillfully constructed, this account also stands as an eyewitness history of the period, because as a child Ung was so aware of her surroundings, and because as an adult writer she adds details to clarify the family's moves and separations.

11. INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR ABOUT THE BOOK

12. Now… TIME TO CHOOSE YOUR NOVEL!