Book picks similar to
The Boat by Alistair MacLeod


short-stories
fiction
short-story
for-school

The First Lie


Sara Shepard - 2012
    But how she got together with Thayer is her juiciest one of all. . . .It's the summer before junior year and Sutton Mercer and her friends rule Hollier High. Then Thayer Vega returns home from soccer camp. In two short months he's gone from being her best friend's scrawny younger brother to a hot soccer god with a major ego—and a bone to pick with the Lying Game girls.To bring him back down to earth, Sutton's friends convince her to string Thayer along so she can publicly reject him. But as she gets to know the real Thayer, Sutton starts to wonder: Is flirting with Thayer still just a game to her? Or is the queen of the Lying Game lying . . . to herself?

The Lottery


Beth Goobie - 2002
    Every autumn Shadow Council holds 'The Lottery', a dreaded ritual which picks a pupil to be the 'victim' - a person who is ignored by the entire school and forced to become Shadow Council's slave.Sally is this year's victim - and she faces the worst year of her life. Humiliated and isolated, her friends desert her and teachers turn a blind eye. But when Shadow Council's demands become increasingly sinister, Sally begins to suspect that maybe more than bad luck is against her . . .A dark and powerful psychological thriller from an extraordinary writer.

Brokeback Mountain


Annie Proulx - 1997
     Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ranch hands, come together when they're working as sheepherder and camp tender one summer on a range above the tree line. At first, sharing an isolated tent, the attraction is casual, inevitable, but something deeper catches them that summer. Both men work hard, marry, and have kids because that's what cowboys do. But over the course of many years and frequent separations this relationship becomes the most important thing in their lives, and they do anything they can to preserve it. The New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for Fiction for its publication of "Brokeback Mountain," and the story was included in Prize Stories 1998: The O. Henry Awards. In gorgeous and haunting prose, Proulx limns the difficult, dangerous affair between two cowboys that survives everything but the world's violent intolerance.

Indian Horse


Richard Wagamese - 2012
    His last binge almost killed him, and now he’s a reluctant resident in a treatment centre for alcoholics, surrounded by people he’s sure will never understand him. But Saul wants peace, and he grudgingly comes to see that he’ll find it only through telling his story. With him, readers embark on a journey back through the life he’s led as a northern Ojibway, with all its joys and sorrows.With compassion and insight, author Richard Wagamese traces through his fictional characters the decline of a culture and a cultural way. For Saul, taken forcibly from the land and his family when he’s sent to residential school, salvation comes for a while through his incredible gifts as a hockey player. But in the harsh realities of 1960s Canada, he battles obdurate racism and the spirit-destroying effects of cultural alienation and displacement. Indian Horse unfolds against the bleak loveliness of northern Ontario, all rock, marsh, bog and cedar. Wagamese writes with a spare beauty, penetrating the heart of a remarkable Ojibway man.

How It Ends


Catherine Lo - 2016
    Shy, anxious Jessie would give anything to have Annie’s beauty and confidence. And Annie thinks Jessie has the perfect life, with her close-knit family and killer grades. They're BFFs…until suddenly they're not. Told through alternating points of view, How It Ends is a wildly fast but deeply moving read about a friendship in crisis. Set against a tumultuous sophomore year of bullying, boys and backstabbing, the novel shows what can happen when friends choose assumptions and fear over each other.

Angelique


Lorena Gale - 2000
    Gale has fashioned a spare but powerful tale that thrusts the indignities of slavery and the stupidity of racism out of the murky 18th century and into the here and now.—Martin Morrow, Calgary Herald

Lost in the Barrens


Farley Mowat - 1956
    They set out on an adventure that proves longer and more dangerous than they could have imagined. Drawing on his knowledge of the ways of the wilderness and the implacable northern elements, Farley Mowat has created a memorable tale of daring and adventure. When first published in 1956, Lost in the Barrens won the Governor-General’s Award for Juvenile Literature, the Book-of-the-Year Medal of the Canadian Association of Children’s Librarians and the Boys’ Club of America Junior Book Award.

A Scandal in Bohemia (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, #1)


Ronald Holt - 1891
    From shopkeepers to kings, everyone wants the help of Sherlock Holmes, but can he solve these mysteries?

Lord of the Flies


William Golding - 1954
    At first, with no adult supervision, their freedom is something to celebrate; this far from civilization the boys can do anything they want. Anything. They attempt to forge their own society, failing, however, in the face of terror, sin and evil. And as order collapses, as strange howls echo in the night, as terror begins its reign, the hope of adventure seems as far from reality as the hope of being rescued. Labeled a parable, an allegory, a myth, a morality tale, a parody, a political treatise, even a vision of the apocalypse, Lord of the Flies is perhaps our most memorable novel about “the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart.”

A Very Medoran Kaldoras: Part 2 (The Medoran Chronicles Book 6)


Lynette Noni - 2021
    

The Sky Is Gray


Ernest J. Gaines - 1963
    A poor African American boy and his mother experience both discrimination and kindness during a trip to town to see the dentist.

The Lesser Blessed


Richard Van Camp - 1996
    His tongue, his hallucinations and his fantasies are hotter than the sun. At sixteen, he loves Iron Maiden, the North and Juliet Hope, the high school "tramp." When Johnny Beck, a Metis from Hay River, moves to town, Larry is ready for almost anything.In this powerful and often very funny first novel, Richard Van Camp gives us one of the most original teenage characters in fiction. Skinny as spaghetti, nervy and self-deprecating, Larry is an appealing mixture of bravado and vulnerability. His past holds many terrors: an abusive father, blackouts from sniffing gasoline, an accident that killed several of his cousins. But through his friendship with Johnny, he’s ready now to face his memories—and his future.Marking the debut of an exciting new writer, The Lesser Blessed is an eye-opening depiction of what it is to be a young Native man in the age of AIDS, disillusionment with Catholicism and a growing world consciousness.A coming-of-age story that any fan of The Catcher in the Rye will enjoy.

Macbeth


Stephen Haynes - 1623
    Prompted by the prophecies of three mysterious witches and goaded by his ambitious wife, the Scottish thane Macbeth murders Duncan, King of Scotland, in order to succeed him on the throne. This foul deed soon entangles the conscience-stricken nobleman in a web of treachery, deceit and more murders that ultimately spells his doom.

Bobcat and Other Stories


Rebecca Lee - 2010
    A student plagiarizes a paper and holds fast to her alibi until she finds herself complicit in the resurrection of one professor's shadowy past. A dinner party becomes the occasion for the dissolution of more than one marriage. A woman is hired to find a wife for the one true soulmate she's ever found. In all, Rebecca Lee traverses the terrain of infidelity, obligation, sacrifice, jealousy, and yet finally, optimism. Showing people at their most vulnerable, Lee creates characters so wonderfully flawed, so driven by their desire, so compelled to make sense of their human condition, that it's impossible not to feel for them when their fragile belief in romantic love, domestic bliss, or academic seclusion fails to provide them with the sort of force field they'd expected.

Speak


Laurie Halse Anderson - 1999
    She is friendless, outcast, because she busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops, so now nobody will talk to her, let alone listen to her. As time passes, she becomes increasingly isolated and practically stops talking altogether. Only her art class offers any solace, and it is through her work on an art project that she is finally able to face what really happened at that terrible party: she was raped by an upperclassman, a guy who still attends Merryweather and is still a threat to her. Her healing process has just begun when she has another violent encounter with him. But this time Melinda fights back, refuses to be silent, and thereby achieves a measure of vindication. In Laurie Halse Anderson's powerful novel, an utterly believable heroine with a bitterly ironic voice delivers a blow to the hypocritical world of high school. She speaks for many a disenfranchised teenager while demonstrating the importance of speaking up for oneself.Speak was a 1999 National Book Award Finalist for Young People's Literature.