Sophomore Roland Rennick-Zuefle recommends “Romeo and/or Juliet” by Ryan North.

“[Romeo and/or Juliet] is a choose-your-own-adventure based on William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It’s one of the weirdest things I’ve read in a long time– there are over 100 different combinations of [outcomes] with love and robots and time travel, stuff like that. It gets crazy. I think the narrator definitely has a sense of humor with it,” Rennick-Zuefle said. “The narrator has a lot of conversations with you, and they’re judging your choices the whole time and I think that’s funny. There are so many stories within it where you’ll randomly be given the option to pull out a book, and there’s another choose-your-own-adventure story that just goes on within that. I like that a lot.” (Riverhead Books)

Junior Minori Saito recommends “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini.

“I read ‘The Kite Runner’ for my AP Seminar class, and it’s one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. It was super gripping, and it’s just such a beautiful tragic story that I feel like everyone should read,” Saito said. “It’s about these two boys in Afghanistan, one is rich and one is a servant, and it’s the story of their lives and how they intertwine and also about the tragedies that happened in Afghanistan, like the Taliban.” (Riverhead Books)

Sophomore Shelby Seidman recommends “The Scholomance Trilogy” by Naomi Novik.

“It’s a trilogy about a dark wizard academy, and it’s dark academic in the way that it’s dark and academic, but it’s not the usual brown and tweed vibe. It’s very hardcore– there’s kids constantly dying in the school because it’s better than dying outside the school,” Seidman said. “The main character, Elle, [is one of my favorite parts of the books] she’s this very lonely teen, and everyone hates her because people in her world have different magical affinities, and her affinity is mass destruction. She doesn’t want to cause mass destruction, it’s just what her magic is good at, and everyone gets that evil vibe off of her, even though she’s actually pretty chill, but everyone just avoids her. The magic system is also really cool and interesting. It’s based around language and a lot of it is learning other languages to learn the spells those languages have written, and you gotta learn about the cultures, too, so it’s very historical.” (Del Rey)

I recommend “Interpreter of Maladies” by Jhumpa Lahiri.

This is a short collection of stories about Indian characters varying in age and gender navigating their lives and relationships. The setting of the stories shifts between the US and Bengal continuously, featuring stories such as “The Third and Final Continent” about an immigrant who goes to live with a 100-year-old woman in her home while he studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech and waits for his wife to immigrate. The stories are concise but they’re also incredibly beautiful, especially when it comes to word choice. They’re short, but they’re meaningful, and they pack a punch– just like all of the best short stories. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)