Pierce County Library System
Information & Imagination

Hatchet
(Gary Paulsen)
Junior Fiction (195 pages) Recommended for Grades 5-12. After a plane crash, thirteen-year-old Brian spends fifty-four days in the wilderness, learning to survive with only the aid of a hatchet given him by his mother, and learning also to survive his parents' divorce. [Kit added 11/2012]

Heart of palm
(Smith, Laura Lee)
Utina, Florida, is a small, down-at-the-heels southern town. Once enlivened by the trade in Palm Sunday palms and moonshine, Utina hasn't seen economic growth in decades, and no family is more emblematic of the local reality than the Bravos. Deserted by the patriarch years ago, the Bravos are held together in equal measure by love, unspoken blame, and tenuously brokered truces. The story opens on a sweltering July day, as Frank Bravo, dutiful middle son, is awakened by a distress call. Frank dreams of escaping to cool mountain rivers, but he has only made it ten minutes from the family restaurant he manages every day and the decrepit, Spanish-moss-draped house he was raised in, and where his strong-willed mother and spitfire sister, both towering redheads, equally matched in stubbornness, are fighting another battle royale. Little do any of them know that Utina is about to meet the tide of development that has already engulfed the rest of Northeast Florida. When opportunity knocks, tempers ignite, secrets are unearthed, and each of the Bravos is forced to confront the tragedies of their shared past

Hillbilly elegy: a memoir of a family and culture in crisis
(Vance, J. D., )
The Vance family story began with hope in postwar America. J.D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

Hippos are huge
(London, Jonathan, )
Juvenile Non-Fiction (29 pages) Recommended for Grades K-3. Overview: Hippos may make you laugh, but watch out! An acclaimed naturalist takes an exuberant look at these massive, swift, and super dangerous animals. What's the deadliest animal in Africa? It's not the lion or the crocodile-it's the hippopotamus! Hippos have razor-sharp tusks, weigh as much as fifty men, and can run twenty-five miles per hour! Follow these hefty hulks as they glide underwater, play tug-of-war, swat balls of dung at one another, and nuzzle their young in the mud. Just don't get too close-they could chomp you in two! [Kit added 1/2018]

Holes (Read the Book, See the Movie)
(Louis Sachar)
Young Adult Fiction (233 pages) Recommended for Grades 6-9. As punishment at Camp Green Lake's detention center, the boys must each dig a hole a day, five feet across, in the hard earth of the dried-up lake bed. The warden is using the boys to dig for loot buried by an outlaw. (Newbery Award 1999) [Kit added 9/2009] [This kit includes the books and 2003 movie of the same title]

Homeless Bird
(Gloria Whelan)
Young Adult Fiction (186 pages) Recommended for Grades 4-8. When thirteen-year-old Koly enters into an ill-fated arranged marriage, she must either suffer a destiny dictated by India's tradition or find the courage to oppose it. [Kit added 7/2010]

Homework Machine, The
(Dan Gutman)
Junior Fiction (146 pages) Recommended for Grades 4-6. Four fifth-grade students, a geek, a class clown, a teacher's pet, and a slacker, as well as their teacher and mothers, each relate events surrounding a computer programmed to complete homework assignments. [Kit added 09/2009]

Hoot (Read the Book, See the Movie)
(Carl Hiaasen)
Young Adult Fiction (292 pages) Recommended for Grades 5-8. Roy, who is new to his small Florida community, becomes involved in another boy's attempt to save a colony of burrowing owls from a proposed construction site. [Kit added 11/2010] [This kit includes the books and 2006 movie of the same title]

House of the Scorpion, The
(Nancy Farmer)
Young Adult Fiction (380 pages) Recommended for Grades 5-12. To most people around him, Matt is not a boy, but a beast. As Matt tries to understand his existence, he is threatened by sinister characters. [Kit added 9/2009]

Housekeeping
(Marilynne Robinson)
The murder of a nobleman in eighteenth-century England leaves a grieving sister and little else. However, when Lady Farrell's husband is suspect in the murder of her brother, she seeks the help of Dr. Silkstone. Dr. Silkstone is a pioneer of forensic detection whose methods have left him an outsider. He agrees to examine the corpse but the keenest blade he will need is his intellect. [Fiction 219 pages] [Added 11/13

Hunger Games
(Suzanne Collins)
Young Adult Fiction (374 pages) Recommended for Grades 9-12. In a future North America, where the rulers of Panem maintain control through an annual televised survival competition pitting young people from each of the twelve districts against one another, sixteen-year-old Katniss's skills are put to the test when she voluntarily takes her younger sister's place. [Kit added 7/2010]