Catalog Search Results
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
Series
Language
English
Description
In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them for...
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...
Author
Language
English
Description
"One of the most prominent voices of her generation debuts with an extraordinarily powerful memoir: the story of a childhood defined by the ever looming absence of her incarcerated father and the path we must take to both honor and overcome our origins. For as long as she could remember, Ashley has put her father on a pedestal. Despite having only vague memories of seeing him face-to-face, she believes he's the only person in the entire world who...
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
Series
Language
English
Description
"The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called "Double Consciousness," a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois's words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans--the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and...
Author
Lexile measure
1330L
Language
English
Description
This poignant and powerful narrative tells the dramatic story of Kunta Kinte, snatched from freedom in Africa and brought by ship to America and slavery, and his descendants. Drawing on the oral traditions handed down in his family for generations, the author traces his origins back to the seventeen-year-old Kunta Kinte, who was abducted from his home in Gambia and transported as a slave to colonial America. In this account Haley provides an imaginative...
Author
Language
English
Description
“Without question, this is McMillan’s best. A glorious novel....A moving tapestry of familial love and redemption.”—The Washington Post
With her hallmark exuberance and a cast of characters so sassy, resilient, and full of life that they breathe, dream, and shout right off the page, Terry McMillan has given us a tour-de-force novel of family, healing, and redemption. A Day Late and a Dollar Short takes...
With her hallmark exuberance and a cast of characters so sassy, resilient, and full of life that they breathe, dream, and shout right off the page, Terry McMillan has given us a tour-de-force novel of family, healing, and redemption. A Day Late and a Dollar Short takes...
Author
Language
English
Description
Discusses the story of the Hemingses, an American slave family that had blood ties to Thomas Jefferson, who had an intimate relationship with Sally Hemings, his slave, and covers how the family of Elizabeth Hemings and John Wayles came under ownership to Jefferson through his marriage to Martha Wayles.
Author
Language
English
Description
"JJ Ferguson has returned home to Pinewood, North Carolina, to build his dream house and to pursue his high school sweetheart Ava. But as he reenters his former world, where factories are in decline and the legacy of Jim Crow is still felt, he's startled to find that the people he once knew and loved have changed just as much as he has"--Back cover.
12) 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: MG - BL: 3.9 - AR Pts: 5
Lexile measure
580L
Language
English
Description
"Celeste knows she should be excited to spend two weeks at her grandparents' lake house with her brother, Owen, and their cousins Capri and Daisy, but she's not. After failing her swimming lessons, she is done with the water--and she knows the trip is just a way to get her in the lake. Her grandparents are strong believers in their family knowing how to swim, especially having grown up during a time of segregation at public pools. They want Celeste...
15) The unsettled
Author
Language
English
Description
"Set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama--about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival."--
From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter's squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty...
Author
Lexile measure
HL 770L
Language
English
Description
Newly weds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft...
17) Red at the bone
Author
Language
English
Description
"Brooklyn, 2001. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, sixteen-year-old Melody celebrates her coming of age wearing a custom-made dress - the very same dress that was sewn for Melody's mother for a celebration that ultimately never took place. Unfurling the history of Melody's family - from the 1921 Tulsa race massacre to post 9/11 New York - Red at the Bone explores sexual desire, race, class and the life-altering facts of parenthood,...
18) 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.
19) Ragtime
Author
Lexile measure
930L
Language
English
Description
The lives of three remarkable families become entwined with Henry Ford, Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Theodore Dreiser, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata at the turn of the century.
20) Harlem shuffle
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably-priced furniture, making a life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver's Row don't approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it's still home. Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has...
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