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
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
Language
English
Description
A powerful, timely debut, The Turner House marks a major new contribution to the story of the American family. The Turners have lived on Yarrow Street for over fifty years. Their house has seen thirteen children grown and gone and some returned; it has seen the arrival of grandchildren, the fall of Detroit's East Side, and the loss of a father. The house still stands despite abandoned lots, an embattled city, and the inevitable shift outward to the...
Author
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
"Successful, secure, and still very much in love, middle-aged couple Eugene and Rosemary Johnson have never given up on one special wish--to be parents. And while Christmas always brings happiness and a whirlwind of holiday fun, their hopes for children of their own seem further away than ever. Especially this year, when Rosemary must have emergency surgery and home help to recuperate. Wanting to lift his wife's spirits, Eugene suddenly has an inspiration...
Author
Language
English
Description
"You just can't plan for this kind of thing. Diane Tate certainly hasn't. She never expected to slowly lose her talented husband to the debilitating effects of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. As a respected family court judge, she's spent her life making tough calls, but when her sixty-eight-year-old husband's health worsens and Diane is forced to move him into an assisted living facility, it seems her world is spinning out of control. As Gregory's...
Author
Pub. Date
2011.
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Josie Henderson is most at home in and around water, and as a senior-level black female scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, she is practically alone in her field. But in building this impressive life for herself, she has tried to shed the one thing she cannot: her family roots back in Cleveland. When Tick, her brother and childhood ally against their alcoholic father, arrives on her doorstep fresh from rehab and teetering on the...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Lottie Rebecca Lee is spoken into the world in Fayetteville, North Carolina by a Black nurse who declares, "Lord Jesus, if that ain't the blackest little baby born this side of heaven." Later, Lottie will prove that she is the ancestors' promise to unearth the Mississippi and Ghanaian atrocities that have tormented Benjamin Lee, her grandfather, who was born during the Great Depression in Mississippi's red clay tobacco fields, and Benjamin Junior,...
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...
10) 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
Language
English
Description
Ptolemy Grey is a 91-year-old man, suffering from dementia and living as a recluse in his Los Angeles apartment. Then Robyn Small, a 17-year-old family friend, appears and helps clean up his apartment and straighten out his life. A reinvigorated Ptolemy volunteers for an experimental medical program that restores his mind, and he uses his last days--shortened now by the medical experiment--to delve into the mystery of the recent drive-by shooting...
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
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...
14) Mrs. Wiggins
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"The daughter of a prostitute mother and alcoholic father, Maggie knew her only way out was to marry someone upstanding and churchgoing like Hubert Wiggins. Hubert has a secret he needs to stay hidden, and Maggie's unexpected charm, elegance, and devotion makes her the perfect partner in lies. Their union makes them the town's most envied couple, complete with a son whom Maggie idolizes. Until he falls in love with the worst fiancée. But the more...
15) Influence
Author
Series
Influence (Carl Weber) volume 1
Language
English
Description
When her son's graduation is upended by a drug charge, lawyer Jacqueline Hudson builds a defense case opposite her ex, a situation that is further complicated by family drama.
Author
Language
English
Description
"In this big-hearted debut about ambition, race, and class, a family grapples with how much of their lineage they're willing to unearth in order to participate in the nation's first federal reparations program. Almost a decade ago, Willie Revel gave up her burgeoning journalism career in New York to help run her father's struggling construction company in Philadelphia. An ambitious single mother, Willie has reluctantly put family first without being...
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
Accelerated Reader
IL: LG - BL: 3.4 - AR Pts: 1
Lexile measure
AD 700L
Language
English
Description
Evelyn Del Rey is Daniela's best friend. They do everything together and even live in twin apartments across the street from each other: Daniela with her mami and hamster, and Evelyn with her mami, papi, and cat. But not after today--not after Evelyn moves away. Until then, the girls play amid the moving boxes until it's time to say goodbye, making promises to keep in touch, because they know that their friendship will always be special. The tenderness...
Author
Language
English
Description
"In her first new book in seven years, Tananarive Due further cements her status as a leading innovator in Black horror and Afrofuturism American Book Award-winning author Tananarive Due's second collection of stories ranges from horror to science fiction to suspense. From the mysterious, magical town of Gracetown to the aftermath of a pandemic to the reaches of the far future, Due's stories all share a sense of dread and fear balanced with heart...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
From the critically acclaimed, award-winning author of Blackberries, Blackberries and Water Street comes an astonishing new novel. A lyrical exploration of love and loss, The Birds of Opulence centers on several generations of women in a bucolic southern black township as they live with and sometimes surrender to madness.
The Goode-Brown family, led by matriarch and pillar of the community Minnie Mae, is plagued by old
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