AP Summer Reading and Writing

AP English 12 Summer Reading and Writing Assignment

Mr. Wilson/Ms. Ferrone

Advanced Placement English 12

Summer Reading and Writing Assignment

All incoming AP English 12 students are required to:

1. Read The Poisonwood Bible and selected chapters of Writing About Literature (further

information about the reading assignments can be found on the reverse side of this sheet).

2. Complete an essay based on these readings (see topic below).

3. Take a multiple choice test on The Poisonwood Bible on the first full day of class.

Note: Students who fail to complete the summer work will be automatically transferred to another section of English 12.

Read The Poisonwood Bible and chapters 1, 8 and 10 in Writing About Literature before you begin. The essay should represent only your ideas; please do not sample or incorporate ideas from other sources. Submit it in double-spaced in Word or Apple Works format.

Topic (adapted from the 2009 Advanced Placement Literature and Composition test):

A symbol is an object, action or event that represents something or that creates a range of

associations beyond itself. In a well-organized essay of 600 words, select one symbol from The Poisonwood Bible and analyze what it reveals about the characters or themes in the book.

Summer Reading Texts

1. Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. New York: Harper Collins, 1998. 543 pp.

One of the most talked about books of its time, The Poisonwood Bible won the National Book Prize of South Africa and was a finalist for the 1998 Pen/Faulkner and Pulitzer Prize awards in the United States. It has been a summer reading selection in numerous AP Language, Literature and World History courses and was one of the essay questions on the 2009 AP Literature and Composition Exam. A brief synopsis from the author’s website, www. kingsolver.com, follows:

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it--from garden seeds to Scripture--is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband's part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters--the self-centered, teenaged Rachel; shrewd adolescent twins Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father's intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and personal responsibility.

2. Roberts, Edgar V. Writing About Literature, 10th edition. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2003. 382 pp. (Chapters 1, 8 and 10 only).