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Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline

Oxford | Academy School | Westbrook in CT

Christina Baker Kline’s Orphan Train is an unforgettable story of friendship and second chances that highlights a little-known but historically significant movement in America’s past—and it includes a special PS section for book clubs featuring insights, interviews, and more.

Penobscot Indian Molly Ayer is close to “aging out” out of the foster care system. A community service position helping an elderly woman clean out her home is the only thing keeping Molly out of juvie and worse…

As she helps Vivian sort through her possessions and memories, Molly learns that she and Vivian aren’t as different as they seem to be. A young Irish immigrant orphaned in New York City, Vivian was put on a train to the Midwest with hundreds of other children whose destinies would be determined by luck and chance.

Molly discovers that she has the power to help Vivian find answers to mysteries that have haunted her for her entire life—answers that will ultimately free them both.

Rich in detail and epic in scope, Orphan Train is a powerful novel of upheaval and resilience, of unexpected friendship, and of the secrets we carry that keep us from finding out who we are.

Pony by R.J. Palacio

Pony by R.J. Palacio

A story about a boy on a quest to rescue his father, with only a ghost as his companion, and a mysterious pony as his guide. Twelve-year-old Silas is awoken in the dead of night by three menacing...
Oxford | Academy School | Westbrook in CT

Circe by Madeline Miller

This beautiful, illuminating tale of hope and courage is based on interviews that were conducted with Holocaust survivor and Auschwitz-Birkenau tattooist Ludwig (Lale) Sokolov—an unforgettable love...
Oxford | Academy School | Westbrook in CT

The Tattooist of Aushwitz by Heather Morris

This beautiful, illuminating tale of hope and courage is based on interviews that were conducted with Holocaust survivor and Auschwitz-Birkenau tattooist Ludwig (Lale) Sokolov—an unforgettable love...
Oxford | Academy School | Westbrook in CT

The Gifted School by Bruce Holsinger

This deliciously sharp novel captures the relentless ambitions and fears that animate parents and their children in modern America, exploring the conflicts between achievement and potential, talent...
Oxford | Academy School | Westbrook in CT

Little Fire Everywhere By Celeste Ng

From the bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You, a riveting novel that traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who...
Oxford | Academy School | Westbrook in CT

Before We Were Yours Lisa Wingate

Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family's Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the...
Oxford | Academy School | Westbrook in CT

And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

Khaled Hosseini, the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has written a new novel about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the...
Oxford | Academy School | Westbrook in CT

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Wells

The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette’s brilliant...
Oxford | Academy School | Westbrook in CT

Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter

Sisters. Strangers. Survivors. More than twenty years ago, Claire and Lydia’s teenaged sister Julia vanished without a trace. The two women have not spoken since, and now their lives could not be...
Oxford | Academy School | Westbrook in CT

The Shack By William P. Young

Mackenzie Allen Philips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon...
Oxford | Academy School | Westbrook in CT

The Zookeepers Wife by Diane Ackerman

A true story in which the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands. After their zoo was bombed, Polish zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski managed to save over three...
Oxford | Academy School | Westbrook in CT

Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult

Ruth Jefferson is a labor and delivery nurse at a Connecticut hospital with more than twenty years’ experience. During her shift, Ruth begins a routine checkup on a newborn, only to be told a few...
Oxford | Academy School | Westbrook in CT

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the...
Oxford | Academy School | Westbrook in CT

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal

What separates your mind from an animal’s? Maybe you think it’s your ability to design tools, your sense of self, or your grasp of past and future―all traits that have helped us define ourselves as...
Oxford | Academy School | Westbrook in CT

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld

Playing on every teen’s passionate desire to look as good as everybody else, Scott Westerfeld (Midnighters) projects a future world in which a compulsory operation at sixteen wipes out physical...
Oxford | Academy School | Westbrook in CT

Relativity by Antonia Hayes

“Twelve-year-old Ethan Forsythe, an exceptionally talented boy obsessed with physics and astronomy, has been raised alone by his mother in Sydney, Australia. Claire, a former professional ballerina,...
Oxford | Academy School | Westbrook in CT

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

"Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds...