Novel "Across the Barricades" by Joan Lingard

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Joan Lingard's tale of Kevin and Sadie explores the reality of a Catholic-Protestant relationship during The Troubles in Northern Ireland, with parallels to the family/child relationships and forbidden love of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. A widely-read and widely-studied Lower Secondary / Middle School modern classic.

Novel "Animal Farm" by George Orwell

George Orwell's seminal short novel is one of those works that every Middle School or Lower Secondary student must read. Discover how Orwell uses animals to explore the meeting of a dream of a perfect world and the reality of human desire, the revolutionary cycle and one revolution in particlar, and human nature, with lessons for us all.