Catalog Search Results
1) Roots
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.4 - AR Pts: 48
Lexile measure
1330L
Language
English
Description
"A condensed version of a portion of this work first appeared in Reader's digest."
Alex Haley traces his family's history from the mid-18th century when one of his ancestors, Kunte Kinte, was captured and sold into slavery. He follows the struggle for freedom that began with the boy's abduction to America and continued throughout the generations that followed.
Author
Series
Everyman's library volume 216
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5 - AR Pts: 14
Lexile measure
870L
Language
English
Description
Four generations of black life in America.
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins,...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.4 - AR Pts: 12
Lexile measure
840L
Language
English
Description
Ward (Salvage the Bones) tells the story of three generations of a struggling Mississippi family in this astonishing novel. "We don't walk no straight lines. It's all happening at once. All of it. We all here at once." This is the explanation 13-year-old Jojo is provided by his grandmother, the family matriarch, on her deathbed. "I'll be on the other side of the door," she reassures him, "With everybody else that's gone before." Jojo and his little...
4) Cane River
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.5 - AR Pts: 20
Lexile measure
970L
Language
English
Description
Follows four generations of African American women from slavery to the early twentieth century as they struggle for economic security and the future of their families along the Cane River in rural Louisiana.
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.5 - AR Pts: 13
Lexile measure
970L
Language
English
Description
"The haunting coming-of-age story that has become a major American classic, now in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition. Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.5 - AR Pts: 5
Language
English
Description
When it was first produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for that season and hailed as a watershed in American drama. A pioneering work by an African-American playwright, the play was a radically new representation of black life. "A play that changed American theater forever." The story tells of a Black family's experiences in south Chicago, as they attempt to improve their financial circumstances...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.9 - AR Pts: 13
Lexile measure
770L
Language
English
Description
Chronicles the not-quite-parallel lives of Dana Lynn Yarboro and Bunny Chaurisse Witherspoon in 1980s Atlanta. Both girls-born four months apart-are the daughters of James Witherspoon, a secret bigamist, but only Dana and her mother, Gwen, are aware of his double life. This, Dana surmises, confers "one peculiar advantage" to her and Gwen over James's other family, with whom he lives full time, though such knowledge is small comfort in the face of...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.3 - AR Pts: 13
Lexile measure
890L
Language
English
Description
A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's family is stocking food--but there isn't much to save. Over twelve days leading up to the arrival of Hurricane Katrina, the family pulls itself up the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty to struggle for another day.
9) Red River
Author
Series
Tademy family chronicles volume 2
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.6 - AR Pts: 19
Language
English
Description
"The intertwining stories of two Louisiana families--three generations of African-American men--and their struggles to make a place for themselves in a country deeply divided in the aftermath of the Civil War and beyond"--Provided by publisher.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.7 - AR Pts: 13
Language
English
Formats
Description
A man risks his soul and his sanity to save his family from malevolent forces in this brilliant novel of horror and the supernatural from the award-winning pioneer of speculative fiction and author of the classic My Soul to Keep.
When Hilton was a boy, his grandmother sacrificed her life to save him from drowning. Thirty years later, he begins to suspect that he was never meant to survive that accident, and that dark forces are working to rectify...
11) The wedding
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.3 - AR Pts: 11
Language
English
Description
In the 1950s, a girl from the black bourgeoisie in Martha's Vineyard announces her engagement to a white musician. The novel follows the impact this has on her family and the community around them.
12) Gabriel's story
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.8 - AR Pts: 16
Language
English
Description
Gabriel Lynch, an African-American teenager who has moved with his mother from New York to live on his stepfather's Kansas homestead, brings serious trouble down upon himself and his family when he leaves the farm to join a group of cowboys who turn out to be a gang of criminals.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.6 - AR Pts: 12
Language
English
Description
Jay is forced to continually cover for his sister, Nicole, who hangs out with the wrong crowd; however, Jay can't deal with it any more. Soon after, Nic fails to return home. When she's deemed missing, the police barely bother to search for her; she's just another lost Black girl. Jay feels guilty and he thinks, "If I hadn't hung up on her that night, she would be home spending time with our grandma. If I was a better brother, she'd be finishing senior...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.4 - AR Pts: 15
Language
English
Description
Surrounded by block parties that liven up the summer nights of their 1969 Philadelphia home, Joe and Louise find their marriage falling apart, a situation that is complicated by the tragic illegal abortion of their daughter's best friend.
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.8 - AR Pts: 9
Lexile measure
910L
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Even though she has six siblings, sixteen-year-old Novah still knows what it's like to feel lonely. Her friends never invite her anywhere because they assume Novah will be too busy overseeing dinner, bath time, and homework--tasks that fall to her when her parents are at work. She wouldn't mind it so much if her "perfect" older sister, Ariana, wasn't always excused from helping out. Needless to say, Novah feels like she's been given a raw deal, especially...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.5 - AR Pts: 11
Language
English
Description
Alice and Willie Bynum, having moved from rural North Carolina to Georgetown in search of a better life for themselves and their children, must find a way to cope when their six-year-old daughter Clara drowns in the Potomac River.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.7 - AR Pts: 14
Language
English
Description
Although distraught, Happi is also unsettled by the way people have idealized the memory of her sister who was killed after attending a social justice rally -- why do people have to be perfect in order to be missed? As a way to honor the memory, however, Happi and her other sister Genny go on a roadtrip using the original "Green Book" -- but the trip reveals secrets neither sister knew about the dead Kezi.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8.7 - AR Pts: 25
Language
English
Formats
Description
As the country enters a new era of conversations around race and the enduring impact of slavery, The Hairstons traces the rise and fall of the largest slaveholding family in the Old South as its descendants-both black and white-grapple with the twisted legacy of their past.
Spanning two centuries of one family's history, The Hairstons tells the extraordinary story of the Hairston clan, once the wealthiest family in the Old South and the largest slaveholder...
19) Back to me
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.6 - AR Pts: 8
Language
English
Formats
Description
Guilty secrets and long-buried resentments cause a rift between cousins Maya and Viviana.
20) Love is the drug
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.8 - AR Pts: 17
Lexile measure
840L
Language
English
Formats
Description
Emily Bird is an African American high school senior in Washington D.C., a member of a privileged medical family, and on the verge of college and the edge of the drug culture. She is not really sure which way she will go--then one day she wakes up in the hospital with no memory of what happened.
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