Upper School Summer Reading 2024

It's 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie's starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardised by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks and illicit intrigue.

A fresh and intimate portrait of desire, consumption and reckless abandon, Come and Get It is a tension-filled story about money, indiscretion, and bad behavior.

A searing, heartbreaking debut about the powerful bonds that make and break an Iranian-American family

Three young brothers leave Los Angeles in the dead of night for Iran, taken by their father from their mother to a country and an ancestral home they barely recognize. They return to the Valley months later, spit back into American life and changed in awful and inexorable ways. Under the annihilating light of the California sun, our protagonist, the youngest brother, tries to piece together a childhood shattered by his father's abuse, a queer adolescence marked by a shy, secret love affair with a boy he meets on the basketball court, and his suddenly-hostile status as a Muslim living under the shadow of 9/11.

Three Asian American teenagers meet in the New York suburbs in the 1980s. Drawn together by their shared sense of alienation from their conventionally domestic immigrant families, each wants to live a meaningful life. They envision a future defined by freedom and creativity, but on the brink of adulthood in New York City, their fortunes quickly diverge.

Moving from the 1980s to the 2040s, spanning multiple eras of a changing New York City, Memory Piece explores the roles of art, friendship, and creativity in self-preservation, chronicling three women as they strive to find value in a radically different world than the one they were promised. Ambitious, visionary, and intellectually playful, Memory Piece asks how we define a good life, individually and collectively, and understanding what we do about the direction our society is headed-where do we go from here?

What would you do if you forgot the love of your life ever even existed?

Stevie and Nora had a love. A secret, epic, once-in-a-lifetime kind of love. They also had a plan: to leave their small, ultra-conservative town and families behind after graduation and move to California, where they could finally stop hiding that love.

But then Stevie has a terrible fall. And when she comes to, she can remember nothing of the last two years—not California, not coming to terms with her sexuality, not even Nora.

Sally Milz is a comedy writer at a late night, weekly sketch show. When her friend and fellow writer Danny Horst becomes the latest talented but average-looking man at the show to be romantically involved with an incredibly beautiful and accomplished female guest host, Sally channels her annoyance into a sketch poking fun at this phenomenon while underscoring how unlikely it is that the reverse would ever happen for a woman.

Enter Noah Brewster, a pop music sensation who signed on as both host and musical guest for this week’s show. Sally and Noah hit it off instantly, and as they collaborate on one sketch after another, she begins to wonder whether there might actually be sparks flying. But this isn’t a romantic comedy; it’s real life. And in real life, someone like him would never date someone like her...right?

Learning how to feel joy while healing from loss, Feyi Adekola starts dating the perfect guy, but discovers she has feelings for someone else who is off limits and must decide just how far she is willing to go for a second chance at love.

For fans of A Man Called Ove, a luminous debut novel about a widow's unlikely friendship with a giant Pacific octopus reluctantly residing at the local aquarium-and the truths she finally uncovers about her son's disappearance 30 years ago.