Fully Updated for the May 2025 AP Exam!

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Ready to succeed in your AP Literature course and ace the exam? This 5 Steps to a 5 guide is more than a review guide -- it's a system that has helped thousands of students walk into test day feeling prepared and confident.

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• Practice with 3 full-length sample tests that align with the latest requirements
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• Review the most important topics you covered throughout the AP school year
• *Everything has been updated to reflect the latest 4-answer choice test format

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• Information on the digital exam format and the College Board Bluebook format

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A Kardashian-like family and the early climate change movement are linked by a suspicious death 30 years ago.

Artie Flanagan leaves his job as scriptwriter for Peepin' on the Pisanos to investigate three tragic accidents connected to the reality show matriarch Suzie Pisano. Backed by a wealthy producer to create a sensational documentary, Flanagan homes in on uncovering secrets about the death of climate activist Jimmy Doherty, a senator rumored to have had a torrid affair with the married Suzie.

As disturbing discoveries mount, Flanagan finds himself not only followed, threatened, and beaten, but also romantically pursued by two of the Pisano daughters, who may well have ulterior motives. Flanagan balances these investigations with his fragmented basement-dwelling home-life, as he finds time for his tree-hugging teenage daughter and his climate scientist girlfriend.

Ultimately, Flanagan must rush to expose shocking truths about the murder and complete the documentary before larger forces bring him down.

Windmills, ghosts, psychiatric ward, uranium, domestic terrorism-rollicking and deep. Only Michael Hartnett. -Joe Edd Morris, author of The Lost Page

The old psychiatric tower has been blown to bits, and FBI agents quickly determine that the suspect with the most plausible answers is a brilliant liar: Robbie DeFonte, a young YouTube star whose family chronicles are steeped in the darker history of the sprawling mental facility. A massive wind farm erected around the ruined psychiatric center buildings becomes central to a lurid tale that transports back a century earlier to unearth a legacy of hidden weapons and lost lives.

As Robbie offers his testimony to Agent Chen, he reveals tunnels below the long-abandoned facility, a dead body found down there in a military uniform, and the toxic remnants of large-scale uranium shipments. Through the lives of his grandfather, the Colonel who ran both the psychiatric center and the elaborate munitions depot, and his grandmother, who uncovered many secrets as a young bride, Robbie spins a yarn that takes the reader back to FDR's clandestine programs and pushes ahead to a wind farm fraught with danger and hope.

Windmill Bluff is a masterful tale that mines America's turbulent past to fuel its blustery future.

This volume reveals a crucial body of work in Irish poetry, previously unavailable in North America. Beginning with a number of his precocious lyrics, written in Hartnett's teens, the volume continues through exquisite love poems and early elegies, some pastoral poems and, later, farewells to pastoral. Hartnett's celebrated declaration to write in Irish introduces a series of translations and announces the more public arguments of subsequent poems in English. The book concludes with five extended parables about salvation and the artistic life. It is undeniable evidence of a singular dedication and achievement.

After Matt Drury earns a perfect score on the SAT, he soon finds himself working for a vast cheating network at his high school, getting paid for services ranging from taking the SAT for classmates with a fake ID to providing social studies homework and test answers for the entire ninth grade. But once inside the cheating network, he encounters corruption, beatings, and even murder. With the help of his oddball friends, Matt soon decides he must expose the network and bring down its nefarious leader, Emil Updike. And he just might be able to, if Updike and the network don't destroy him first. Michael Hartnett accomplishes what endless vocabulary lists haven't by presenting 1500 challenging words in a classic mystery format complete with detective, sidekick, victim and an assortment of idiosyncratic characters who will certainly resonate with high school readers. The narrator's observations-hilarious poignant and literary- are a blend of high and low comedy and thoroughly engage the reader who anxiously awaits the next outrageous pun, metaphor, malapropism or allusion. A modern hybrid, The Great Sat Swindle manages to explore key social, psychological and ethical issues facing adolescents while incorporating critical reading and vocabulary skills through dialogue, character, theme and clever footnotes. With its irreverent satire and authentic voice, The Great SAT Swindle makes mastering vocabulary enjoyable and meaningful. - Estelle Rankin, co-author of 5 Steps to a 5 AP English Literature & McGraw Hill's Writing an Outstanding College Application Essay

Stunning! Rarified! A Tour de Force! -Joe Edd Morris, Bestselling Author of The Lost Page

El Buscador has long been legendary for revealing, to select visitors, New York's secrets. Now he confronts his greatest challenge: the real estate mogul Timothy Terrance Tolland has been erecting skyscrapers at an alarming rate. Tolland's mysterious construction at Canal Street threatens to tear the city's fabric. Aided by a group of investigative reporters, El Buscador looks to bring Tolland down before his building forever transforms the skyline.

But the battle also goes on below the street as Tolland has initiated a campaign of dyeing the city's rats blue so that the vermin become as much of his brand as his buildings. Follow along on El Buscador's adventures as he takes the reader to little-known places - from underground streams to forgotten tombs to rat pits - and unearths secrets long buried in the city. Ultimately, his battle with Tolland spectacularly exposes nefarious plans that will surprise even jaded New Yorkers.

Imaginative, Intriguing, Prophetic. Hartnett at his best -Joe Edd Morris, author of The Prison

Escaping an assassination attempt, the underground figure El Buscador lands in Brooklyn's Gowanus, home of a toxic canal. His mortal adversary, developer Timothy Tolland, has proposed for Gowanus a magnificent canal district, featuring humpbacked bridges, majestic ramps, and inspired industrial architecture.

Distrustful of Tolland's intentions, El Buscador works to undermine the project. Soon, he understands that the only way to succeed is to become the thing that he hates. Complicating his maneuvers is the presence of an eight-foot sturgeon that has made the contaminated canal its new home. Nicknamed the Gwaken, the sturgeon draws great interest in Gowanus, adding to the carnival atmosphere of a community indulging in new-age Ganja desserts and frequenting a shady establishment that serves Brooklyn's worst pizza.

Secret meetings, floods, and the opening of long hidden channels lead to a spectacular climax along a canal whose toxicity can lead either to its resurrection or to its demise.

You'll love the ride of this funny and fast-paced story about the conflicts faced by Hash O'Connell and his friends as they travel by garbage truck through reality and virtual reality. -Joseph Gansrow, author of Deconstructing and Reconstructing Sentences

They line up in Frick Village to get on the garbage truck: the disoriented, the suicidal, the desperate, even the kid who won't look up from her cell phone.

They are Generation Dementia, high school seniors who have lost their bearings. When a video made about the troubled teens on the garbage truck goes viral, the reality TV crews come around to repackage Generation Dementia and the trash they haul.

Narrator Hash O'Connell rebels against this makeover and soon finds he and his friends are confronted with a darker underside of both his community and the cameras now framing it. Hash unearths disturbing secrets about twenty years of lost trash and the lurid tales buried with that refuse. Ultimately, Hash encounters the corruptions of Frick's past, revelations that will transform his understanding of his family's legacy and allow him to emerge from the rubble he has inherited.