This is a brilliant story about a young boy who refuses to live down to the expectations of the people surrounding him.  Junior makes the difficult choice to go to school off the reservation, to put himself in an unfamiliar and difficult situation in order to learn.  Set on the Spokane Reservation, the book has a northwest feel.  A work of fiction based somewhat on Sherman Alexie’s life, the story is told in language teenagers will understand and affirms that with struggle it is possible to reach your potential. What parent wouldn’t be uplifted by this message?  It has won both the National Book Award and the PNBA award.  Yet it was banned in the Redmond School district.

The Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini is a moving story of betrayal and redemption set against the poignant backdrop of war torn Afghanistan.  Amir and his father make it out of Afghanistan, but his childhood companion stayed in Afghanistan where the Taliban’s rule has not been benevolent.  Amir is haunted by an act of cowardice and shame in his childhood.  He owes Hassan a debt.  Returning to his war torn homeland is the only path to redemption.  This is an important book that provides an insight into another culture as well as a compelling story of two young boys and the secret they keep. 

Led by the intrepid Hayduke, a motley gang wages war on the big yellow machines that have come to destroy the landscape they love.  Hilarious, outrageous, passionate, and totally full of himself, Edward Abbey was an original.  He was vehemently opposed to the construction of the Glen Canyon dam, a dam that obliterated Native petro glyphs and is now viewed by quite a few as a mistake.  Too late for all that pretty landscape, it has been drowned for a long time now.  Abbey pours all the rage and furor of his opposition to despoiling wild places into his fiction.  Edward Abbey defies definition, he is not about to fit into any neat little box.  An impassioned environmentalist, he was also known to shoot television sets and litter the desert he loved with their debris.  His fictional characters are likely to toss beer cans out the window.   Ed Abbey was one of those guys who eat up life in great big gulps.  In his fiction he lets us have a little taste of what it is like to live large.

Codi comes home to the small town of Grace Arizona to care for her father, the town doctor now suffering from Alzheimer’s.  There are unresolved issues lying in wait for Codi, an old love not forgotten, her sense of failure for not becoming a doctor, her remote relationship with her father.  Kingsolver allows her characters the freedom of their faults, she does not try to smooth the rough edges.  Codi is an interesting character, a woman who comes to terms with her choices and her relationships.  As in all of Kingsolver’s writing, her love of the southwestern landscape shines through on the page.