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]

Hate u give, The
(Thomas, Angie)
Recommended for Grades 9-12. "Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil's name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr. But what Starr does--or does not--say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life."--Amazon

High achiever: the incredible true story of one addict's double life
(Jenkins, Tiffany)
"When word got out that Tiffany Jenkins was withdrawing from opiates on the floor of a jail cell, people in her town were shocked. Not because of the twenty felonies she'd committed, or the nature of her crimes, or even that she'd been captain of the high school cheerleading squad just a few years earlier, but because her boyfriend was a Deputy Sherriff, and his friends--their friends--were the ones who'd arrested her. A raw and twisty page-turning memoir that reads like fiction, High Achiever spans Tiffany's life as an active opioid addict, her 120 days in a Florida jail where every officer despised what she'd done to their brother in blue, and her eventual recovery. With heart-racing urgency and unflinching honesty, Jenkins takes you inside the grips of addiction and the desperate decisions it breeds. She is a born storyteller who lived an incredible story, from blackmail by an ex-boyfriend to a soul-shattering deal with a drug dealer, and her telling brims with suspense and unexpected wit. But the true surprise is her path to recovery. Tiffany breaks through the stigma and silence to offer hope and inspiration to anyone battling the disease--whether it's a loved one or themselves."--Amazon

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 Nonfiction (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]

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]

Housekeeping
(Marilynne Robinson)
Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone, set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.

How to be an antiracist
(Kendi, Ibram X.)
"The only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it -- and then dismantle it." Ibram X. Kendi's concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America -- but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it.

How to be animal: a new history of what it means to be human
(Challenger, Melanie)
"Our troubled relationship with being an animal-and why we need a better one." Humans are the most inquisitive, emotional, imaginative, aggressive animals on the planet. And we also happen to be the only animal that doesn't like to think it's an animal. So how well do we really know ourselves? 'How to Be Animal' argues that at the heart of our existence is a profound struggle with being animal. We possess a psychology that seeks separation between humanity and the rest of nature, and we have invented grand ideaologies to magnify this. As well as piecing together the mystery of how this mindset evolved, Melanie Challenger examines the wide-reaching ways in which it affects our lives. We travel from the origin of Homo sapiens through the agrarian and industrial revolutions, the age of the internet, and on to the futures of AI and human-machine interface. Blending nature writing, history, and moral philosophy, How to be Animal is both a fascinating reappraisal of what it means to be human and a robust defense of all that is rich and rewarding about being an animal. -- taken from back cover

Huntress, The: a novel
(Quinn, Kate)
Stranded behind enemy lines, brave bomber pilot Nina Markova becomes the prey of a lethal Nazi murderess known as the Huntress and joins forces with a Nazi hunter and British war correspondent to find her before she finds them.