Middle School Books

[Hypotheticalfox]

Hi all,

I teach 8th grade English and recently found out there might be money in the budget to buy some new books next year. I'm working on developing two new units, troubles teens and mysteries/detectives.

 

For the troubled teens unit, I plan on using The Outsiders and something by Walter Dean Meyers (the school has sets of those), but I'd like to get a "girl version" of those book too. The problem I run into is most of the books I find have girls being abused rather than being than having the agency to make the poor decision for themselves. There's nothing wrong with hat type of book it's just not what I'm looking for. Any suggestions?

 

For the mysteries/detective unit, I plan on using some Sherlock Holmes, some Poe mysteries (Murder at the Rue Morgue for example), and possibly The Westing Game but I'm also searching for something more modern, possibly with a CSI/ forensics vibe. Or something non-fiction about similar topics. Again, suggestions?

[CheshireCrab]

Back in middle school my teacher divided our class by gender and gave us two books. For the guys it was Breathing Underwater by Alex Finn, for the girls it was Perfect by Natasha Friend.

 

Breathing Underwater was about a high-school athlete who struggles with anger management issues and becomes abusive towards his girlfriend. Perfect is about a middle schooler who develops an eating disorder. Both books are about coping with these struggles, and our teacher assigned them to us by gender because they were relate-able and realistic problems that we would likely be dealing with at our age.

 

The other one we read was a book called Lush, also by Natasha Friend. I really enjoyed this book, it's about a girl who is dealing with the body issues, family issues, and social issues all while dealing with an alcoholic father. The protagonist, Samantha, finds a way to express her feelings by writing to an anonymous pen pal using an old library book. Our teacher had us do something similar and write our own anonymous letters to students in other class periods. It was a pretty fun exercise.