Summer Reading 2024: Upper School

In her debut collection, internationally acclaimed writer Bolu Babalola retells the most beautiful love stories from history and mythology with incredible new detail and vivacity. Focusing on the magical folktales of West Africa, Babalola also reimagines Greek myths, ancient legends from the Middle East, and stories from long-erased places. With an eye towards subverting tropes inherent in our favorite tales of love, Babalola has created captivating stories that traverse across perspectives, continents, and genres. Witty, joyful, and richly imaginative, Love in Color is a celebration of romance in all its many splendid forms.

Forgotten by history and diminished by poets, Medusa's two sister have never been more than horrifying hags, damned and doomed. But the Gorgons were sisters first. Curious about mortals and their lives, Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale entered the human world in search of a place to belong, yet quickly found themselves at the perilous center of a dangerous Olympian rivalry and learned—too late—that a god's love is a violent one. Monsters, but not monstrous, Stheno and Euryale will step into the light for the first time to tell the story of how all three sisters lived and were changed by each other, as they struggle against the inherent conflict between sisterhood and individuality, myth and truth, vengeance and peace.

In the middle of the night, a woman wakes to find her beloved city engulfed in flames. Ten seemingly endless years of conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans are over. Troy has fallen. From the Trojan women whose fates now lie in the hands of the Greeks, to the Amazon princess who fought Achilles on their behalf, to Penelope awaiting the return of Odysseus, to the three goddesses whose feud started it all, these are the stories of the women whose lives, loves, and rivalries were forever altered by this long and tragic war. A woman's epic, powerfully imbued with new life, A Thousand Ships puts the women, girls and goddesses at the center of the Western world's great tale ever told.

While the tale of Cupid and Psyche may be one of the most famous love stories in classical mythology, the author of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe found it hauntingly "illogical." In his final work of fiction, C.S. Lewis turns the story on its head, telling it from the perspective of Orual, Psyche's embittered, obsessive, and ugly older sister. She is furious that Cupid has taken her Psyche away, for whose love could possibly compare to that of the god of love? Set against the backdrop of Glome, a barbaric, pre-Christian world, Orual struggles to understand, her sister, her self, and the lines between sacred and profane love. A brilliant examination of envy, betrayal, loss, blame, grief, guilt, and conversion, Lewis's novel (the one he called "far and away my best book") reminds us of our own fallibility and the role of a higher power in our lives.

In The Aeneid, Vergil's hero fights to claim the king's daughter, Lavinia, with whom he is destined to found an empire. Lavinia herself never speaks a word. Now, Ursula K. Le Guin gives Lavinia a voice in a novel that takes us to the half-wild world of ancient Italy, when Rome was a muddy village near seven hills. Lavinia grows up knowing nothing but peace and freedom, until suitors come. Her mother wants her to marry handsome, ambitious Turnus. But omens and prophecies spoken by the sacred springs say she must marry a foreigner–that she will be the cause of a bitter war–and that her husband will not live long. When a fleet of Trojan ships sails up the Tiber, Lavinia decides to take her destiny into her own hands. And so she tells us what Vergil did not: the story of her life, and of the love of her life.

A contemporary twist on The Odyssey, An Orchestra of Minorities is narrated by the spirit of a young poultry farmer named Chinonso. His life is set off course when he sees a woman who is about to jump off a bridge. Horrified by her recklessness, he hurls two of his prized chickens off the bridge. The woman, Ndali, is stopped in her tracks. Chinonso and Ndali soon fall in love, but when her family objects to the union on the grounds that he is not her social equal, he sells most of his possessions to attend college in Cyprus. When he arrives in Cyprus, however, he discovers that he has been utterly duped by the young Nigerian who has made the arrangements for him. Penniless, homeless, and furious at a world which continues to relegate him to the sidelines, Chinonso gets further away from his dream, from Ndali and the farm he called home. Spanning continents, traversing the earth and cosmic spaces, and told by a narrator who has lived for hundreds of years, Chigozie Obioma weaves a heart-wrenching epic about destiny and determination.

In the holy city of Tova, the winter solstice is usually a time for celebration and renewal. This year, though, it coincides with a solar eclipse, a rare celestial event proscribed by the Sun Priest as an unbalancing of the world. Meanwhile, a ship launches from a distant city bound for Tova and set to arrive on the solstice. It carries a single passenger. Described as harmless, the passenger is a young man–blind, scarred, and cloaked in destiny. But as the captain well knows, when a man is described as harmless, he usually ends up being a villain... Crafted with unforgettable characters and inspired by the civilizations of the Pre-Columbian Americas, Rebecca Roanhorse has created an epic adventure woven with celestial prophecies, political intrigue, and forbidden magic.

When young, beautiful Roza went missing, the people of Bone Gap weren’t surprised. After all, it wasn’t the first time that someone had slipped away. That’s just how things go, the people said. Who are you going to blame? But Finn knows that it's different with Roza. He knows she was kidnapped, ripped from the cornfields by a dangerous man whose face he cannot remember. But the searches turned up nothing, and no one believes him anymore. Not even Sean, who has more reason to find Roza than anyone, and every reason to blame Finn for letting her go. As we follow the stories of Finn, Roza, and the people of Bone Gap—their melancholy pasts, their terrifying presents, their uncertain futures—acclaimed author Laura Ruby weaves a heartbreaking tale of love and loss, magic and mystery, regret and forgiveness—a story about how the face the world sees is never the sum of who we are.