Welcome to your senior year of AP English. You have committed yourself to a rewarding and stimulating year of rigorous literary analysis and inquiry. As you know, AP English is a college level class that may, upon obtaining a successful score on the AP Exam, translate into college credit. It is our goal that you will be successful on the AP Exam in May of 2019. Meeting this goal will depend largely on your dedication to the course requirements.  

We will have our first reading essay in mid- September, at which point every student should have read at least one of the books listed below. To avoid hasty reading and to make the experience more meaningful, students are encouraged to read and take notes on at least one of the books over the summer. If you do more than one you will have the opportunity to use the additional books in your fall essay.

• Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini) – In this acclaimed novel Hosseini provides an educational and eye-opening account of a country's political turmoil--in this case, Afghanistan--while also developing characters heartbreaking struggles and emotional triumphs.
• Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan) - Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. 
• Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger) - The influential and widely acclaimed story details the two days in the life of 16-year-old Holden Caulfield after he has been expelled from prep school. Confused and disillusioned as he traverses the streets of New York City, he searches for truth and rails against the "phoniness" of the adult world.
• The Road (Cormac McCarthy) – A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. McCarthy’s acclaimed novel is the profoundly moving story of a journey, an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.
• Kindred (Octavia Butler)- Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her 26th birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the pre-Civil War South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

Please view the full details of the highly suggested summer reading experience through this link: AP Lit Summer Reading Experience 

I look forward to a very successful and enganging 2018-2019 school year!

Sincerely,

Mrs. Fletcher