Me and Earl and the Dying Girl / Jesse Andrews / Six Degrees of Reading

SIX DEGREES OF YA LITERATURE

1. Greg has clique-jumped his way through all of high school. His only consistent friend is Earl with whom he has nothing in common except a love of film. Greg’s mother insists that Greg befriend Rachel, a girl who is dying from leukemia. Greg’s uncomfortable new friendship with Rachel is awkward, touching, and hilarious in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews.

2. Eleanor, a poverty stricken outcast at a new school and Park, a teen trying to find himself in the daily monotony of life cross paths on the bus and find hope and healing through their relationship in Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell.

3. Four orphans are selected by a cruel nobleman to see who has the ability to impersonate a long-lost prince in The False Prince by Jennifer Nielsen.

4. Trash by Andy Mulligan follows Raphael, Gordo, and Rat as they sort through the mystery of an important find they discovered while digging through a trash dump in a third-world country.

5. Tyrell is living in a homeless shelter with his mother and brother trying desperately to stay out of the cycle of poverty and helplessness that sent his father to jail in Coe Booth’s Tyrell.

6. In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, Junior is too smart and too driven to stay in his school on the Spokane Indian Reservation but once he leaves to go to the “fancy” school in Reardon he feels like an outcast in both worlds. Junior’s humor and intelligence, however, inspires hope and relays his resiliency in finding himself outside his comfort zone.

List courtesy of Maggie M (SP)