The 7th & 8th Grade Battle of the Books is coming! On Wednesday, February 19 at 7 PM, seventh & eighth graders will battle for book knowledge supremacy at Quaker Valley Middle School.
Registration
- Team registration must be completed by January 31 by 8:00 PM.
- Teams have 1-5 members.
- If you can’t find a team or need members for your team, contact Ms. Heather or Ms. Emily.
- Register online or fill out a paper form at the library.
- Team managers will receive an information packet upon registration.
Books
Wild Ride
By Keith Calabrese
Available as a book.
Summary: The grownups are out-of-town, and for Charley Decker that means one thing: a last epic weekend with her older brother Greg before he leaves for college. Bring on the burgers, milkshakes, and movie marathons!
So when Greg ditches Charley for a date night downtown, she’s kind of crushed. Worse, he gets their mom’s boyfriend’s super-expensive, super-rare Mustang towed and needs Charley’s help to get it back. What’s an unsupervised seventh grader to do? Grab her best friends, sneak into the city, pull off the ultimate car heist, and then make Greg pay, of course!
Only now the Mustang has a new feature in the trunk: a stowaway named Mitch who’s guarding a world-changing secret. And a pair of seriously big, seriously scary dudes are after him.
What follows is an all-night race around the clock as Charley and her friends try to dodge the twin terrors, save Mitch, fix a sibling squabble…and get the Mustang home before morning!
Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre
By Brandy Colbert
Available as a book, large print book, and ebook.
Summary: In the early morning of June 1, 1921, a white mob marched across the train tracks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and into its predominantly Black Greenwood District–a thriving, affluent neighborhood known as America’s Black Wall Street. They brought with them firearms, gasoline, and explosives.
In a few short hours, they’d razed thirty-five square blocks to the ground, leaving hundreds dead. The Tulsa Race Massacre is one of the most devastating acts of racial violence in US history. But how did it come to pass? What exactly happened? And why are the events unknown to so many of us today?
These are the questions that award-winning author Brandy Colbert seeks to answer in this unflinching nonfiction account of the Tulsa Race Massacre. In examining the tension that was brought to a boil by many factors–white resentment of Black economic and political advancement, the resurgence of white supremacist groups, the tone and perspective of the media, and more–a portrait is drawn of an event singular in its devastation, but not in its kind. It is part of a legacy of white violence that can be traced from our country’s earliest days through Reconstruction, the Civil Rights movement in the mid-twentieth century, and the fight for justice and accountability Black Americans still face today.
A Perfect Mistake
By Melanie Conklin
Available as a book.
Summary: Max wishes he could go back in time to before he was diagnosed with ADHD, before he grew to be the tallest kid in his class, and before he and his best friends went into the woods in the middle of the night. Max doesn’t remember what happened after he left his friends Will and Joey and the older kids who took them there. He’s not sure if he wants to remember. Knowing isn’t going to make Joey talk to him again, or bring Will out of his coma.
When the local authorities run out of leads, Max realizes that without his help, they may never know what really happened to Will. Charged by the idea that he may be the key to uncovering the truth, Max pairs up with classmate and aspiring journalist Sam to investigate what really happened that night. But not everyone in the community wants that night to be remembered.
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It Found Us
By Lindsay Currie
Available as a book.
Summary: Twelve-year-old Hazel Woods has always had an unusual knack for sleuthing. Some may call it snooping, but all she really wants is to solve mysteries around town. So, when she not-so-accidentally overhears her brother Den planning to sneak into the cemetery at night for an epic game of hide-and-seek, she decides to secretly tag along. This seems like the perfect opportunity to investigate the claims that the cemetery is haunted.
But the moment the game ends, Hazel realizes something is very, very wrong. From her hiding spot in the bushes, she overhears that her brother’s best friend, Everett, is missing. Everyone else was found by the seeker but there’s no sign of Everett anywhere. It’s as if he just . . . vanished
Hazel and Den are determined to find Everett before it’s too late. But as they begin to unravel the terrifying clues that started appearing since that night in the graveyard–eerie whispers that sound like someone counting, the intermittent smell of smoke, and the cold, lost presence that follows them everywhere, she’s not sure what they are dealing with. But Everett needs more than search parties and scent-tracking dogs to find him, especially if his disappearance is tied to the history of the cemetery, and the lost, century-old spirits that might still be trapped there.
Deathless #1: The Gilded Ones
By Namina Forna
Available as a book, ebook, and digital audiobook.
Summary: Sixteen-year-old Deka lives in fear and anticipation of the blood ceremony that will determine whether she will become a member of her village. Already different from everyone else because of her unnatural intuition, Deka prays for red blood so she can finally feel like she belongs.
But on the day of the ceremony, her blood runs gold, the color of impurity-and Deka knows she will face a consequence worse than death.
Then a mysterious woman comes to her with a choice: stay in the village and submit to her fate, or leave to fight for the emperor in an army of girls just like her. They are called alaki-near-immortals with rare gifts. And they are the only ones who can stop the empire’s greatest threat.
Knowing the dangers that lie ahead yet yearning for acceptance, Deka decides to leave the only life she’s ever known. But as she journeys to the capital to train for the biggest battle of her life, she will discover that the great walled city holds many surprises. Nothing and no one are quite what they seem to be-not even Deka herself.
Wrecker
By Carl Hiassen
Available as a book, ebook, and digital audiobook.
Summary: Valdez Jones VIII calls himself Wrecker because his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather salvaged shipwrecks for a living. So is it destiny, irony, or just bad luck when Wrecker comes across a speedboat that has run hard aground on a sand flat? The men in the boat don’t want Wrecker to call for help–in fact, they’ll pay him to forget he ever saw them. Wrecker would be happy to forget, but he keeps seeing these men all over Key West–at the marina, in the cemetery, even right outside his own door. And now they want more than his silence–they want a lookout. He’ll have to dive deep into their shady dealings to figure out a way to escape this tangled net.
Thieves’ Gambit
By Kayvion Lewis
Available as a book, CD audiobook, ebook, and digital audiobook.
Summary: At only seventeen years old, Ross Quest is already a master thief, especially adept at escape plans. Until her plan to run away from her legendary family of thieves takes an unexpected turn, leaving her mother’s life hanging in the balance.
In a desperate bid, she enters the Thieves’ Gambit, a series of dangerous, international heists where killing the competition isn’t exactly off limits, but the grand prize is a wish for anything in the world–a wish that could save her mom. When she learns two of her competitors include her childhood nemesis and a handsome, smooth-talking guy who might also want to steal her heart, winning the Gambit becomes trickier than she imagined.
Ross tries her best to stick to the family creed: trust no one whose last name isn’t Quest. But with the stakes this high, Ross will have to decide who to con and who to trust before time runs out. After all, only one of them can win.
Instructions for Dancing
By Nicola Yoon
Available as a book, CD audiobook, ebook, and digital audiobook.
Summary: Evie Thomas doesn’t believe in love anymore. Especially after the strangest thing occurs one otherwise ordinary afternoon: She witnesses a couple kiss and is overcome with a vision of how their romance began…and how it will end. After all, even the greatest love stories end with a broken heart, eventually.
As Evie tries to understand why this is happening, she finds herself at La Brea Dance Studio, learning to waltz, fox-trot, and tango with a boy named X. X is everything that Evie is not: adventurous, passionate, daring. His philosophy is to say yes to everything–including entering a ballroom dance competition with a girl he’s only just met.
Falling for X is definitely not what Evie had in mind. If her visions of heartbreak have taught her anything, it’s that no one escapes love unscathed. But as she and X dance around and toward each other, Evie is forced to question all she thought she knew about life and love. In the end, is love worth the risk?
Rules
- Each team has a Team Manager. The Manager can be a family member, teacher, or high school student.
- Each team member can only borrow 3 books at a time.
- The overdue fines for Battle books are $0.25 per day.
- Teams arrive at Battle at least 15 minutes before it starts.
- Teams seat together in a circle. One team member will be elected Secretary. The Team Secretary will be solely responsible for recording team answers.
- Team Managers will be assigned to monitor a team that is not their own. Monitors collect and check team answers and record their score.
- The Battle Moderators will ask each question twice and show it on a screen.
- There are 3 rounds with 1 question from each book.
- Teams have 20 seconds to write down their answers.
- Up to 5 points are awarded for each answer: 4 for answering the question correctly + 1 for spelling the author’s last name correctly.
