Catalog Search Results
1) Passing
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"Irene Redfield, married to a successful physician, enjoys a comfortable life in Harlem. Reluctantly, she renews her friendship with old school friend, Clare Kendry. Clare, who like Irene is light skinned, 'passes' as white and is married to a racist white man who has no idea about Clare's racial heritage. Even though Irene knows that reigniting her friendship with Clare will lead to trouble, she can't resist allowing Irene into her world. Meanwhile,...
Author
Language
English
Description
"In The Solace of Water, Elizabeth Byler Younts tells the story of two women, one white and one black, in racially charged 1956, who fight personal battles of freedom and form a friendship that neither expected.After the loss of her young son, Carver, an African-American preacher's wife named Delilah Evans moves with her family from Montgomery, Alabama, to Sinking Creek, Pennsylvania, for a fresh start. The last thing she could have imagined was becoming...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4 - AR Pts: 9
Lexile measure
HL 670L
Language
English
Description
"Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Alice Walker's iconic modern classic is now a Penguin Book." A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty...
Author
Language
English
Description
"When Ruby King's mother is found murdered in their home in Chicago's South Side, the police dismiss it as another act of violence in a black neighborhood. But for Ruby, it's a devastating loss that leaves her on her own with her violent father. While she receives many condolences, her best friend, Layla, is the only one who understands how this puts Ruby in jeopardy. Their closeness is tested when Layla's father, the pastor of their church, demands...
Author
Language
English
Description
"It's 1924 South Carolina and the region is still recovering from the infamous boll weevil infestation that devastated the land and the economy. Gertrude, a mother of four, must make an unconscionable decision to save her daughters from starvation or die at the hands of an abusive husband. Retta is navigating a harsh world as a first-generation freed slave, still employed by the Coles, influential plantation proprietors who once owned her family....
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Four elderly southern women share a house, a history, and heartbreaking secrets.
Baby girl, I hope you're listening real good to what I'm gonna tell you about that sure-enough miracle we got us. Had to be a miracle, because in all my born days, I didn't never think it could turn out like this. Didn't never think you'd be sitting right here on this very porch with me, hearing me talk about all us folks you don't know nothing much about yet.....
Baby girl, I hope you're listening real good to what I'm gonna tell you about that sure-enough miracle we got us. Had to be a miracle, because in all my born days, I didn't never think it could turn out like this. Didn't never think you'd be sitting right here on this very porch with me, hearing me talk about all us folks you don't know nothing much about yet.....
9) The street
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.2 - AR Pts: 19
Language
English
Description
"The Street follows the spirited Lutie Johnson, a newly single mother whose efforts to claim a share of the American Dream for herself and her young son meet frustration at every turn in 1940s Harlem. Opening a fresh perspective on the realities and challenges of black, female, working-class life, The Street became the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies"--
Author
Language
English
Description
"Set during Reconstruction-era New Orleans, this new work from the acclaimed author of Between Earth and Sky is a powerful story of human resilience--and of the unlikely bonds that hold fast even in our darkest moments. Effie Jones, a former slave who escaped to the Union side as a child, knows the truth of her words. Taken in by an army surgeon and his wife during the War, she learned to read and write, to tolerate the sight of blood and broken bodies--and...
11) Maya Angelou
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: LG - BL: 4.2 - AR Pts: 1
Lexile measure
680L
Language
English
Formats
Description
Maya Angelou spent much of her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas. After a traumatic event at age eight, she stopped speaking for five years. However, Maya rediscovered her voice through wonderful books, and went on to become one of the world's most beloved writers and speakers.
12) Libertie
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Description
"Coming of age as a free-born Black girl in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson is all too aware that her mother, a physician, has a vision for their future together: Libertie will go to medical school and practice alongside her. But Libertie feels stifled by her mother's choices and is constantly reminded that, unlike her mother, Libertie has skin that is too dark. When a young man from Haiti proposes to Libertie and promises she will be...
13) Meridian
Author
Lexile measure
1010L
Language
English
Formats
Description
Meridian is a poignant and powerful story of the American South in the 1960s and of one woman who risks her life for the people she loves. Meridian Hill, a courageous young activist, creates peace and understanding by dedicating herself heart and soul to her civil rights work, touching the lives of all those she meets even when her health begins to deteriorate. With the old rules of Southern society collapsing around her, Meridian fights a lonely...
14) Quicksand
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Born to a white Danish mother and a Black American father, Helga Crane has long struggled to carve a path for herself amid the racial segregation of the early twentieth century. As a teacher at an all-Black boarding school in the South, Helga quickly becomes unsettled by the way the school measures excellence based on proximity to whiteness. Journeying to Chicago, Harlem, and Copenhagen, she attempts to thrive free from the constraints of category--mother...
15) Our Gen
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The Gen--short for Sexagenarian--is an upscale fifty-five-plus community located in the bucolic suburbs of Philadelphia. Main character Cynthia befriends the Gen's two other Black residents, Bloc and Tish, as well as Lavia, who everyone assumes is from India. They regularly convene to smoke weed, line dance, and debate politics and philosophy as the wine goes down like silk. Their camaraderie is exhilarating. But beneath the fun and froth, storms...
16) Lavina
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Lavina traverses the near present, in the 1990s and the segregated South of the 1960s. It is the story of Mary Jacob, a children's book author who has virtually no memory of her early life. Billy Ray, Lavina's son and a musical genius, remembers all too well what happened to them on a hot August day in 1963 when their lives changed forever. When the two of them meet again in their hometown, it propels them back to their childhoods. In the second part...
17) Solemn
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Solemn Redvine is a precocious Mississippi girl who senses a nearby baby may be her half-sibling: the outcome of her father's mistakes with a married woman who lives in their trailer park. After Solemn witnesses a man throw the baby down a community well, she struggles to understand the event, leaving her forever changed. As Solemn finds refuge in fantasies of stardom as well as friendships with her brother's wife and a nearby girl, the ill-fated...
18) Freshwater road
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
When University of Michigan sophomore Celeste Tyree travels to Mississippi to volunteer her efforts in the Freedom Summer of 1964, she's assigned to help register voters in the small town of Pineyville, a place best known for a notorious lynching that occurred only a few years earlier. As the long, hot summer unfolds, Celeste befriends several members of the community, but there are also those who are threatened by her and the change that her presence...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: LG - BL: 4.9 - AR Pts: 1
Lexile measure
900L
Language
English
Description
"A biography of African American writer, performer, and activist Maya Angelou, who turned a childhood of trauma and emotional pain to become one of the most inspiring voices of our lifetime. Includes afterword, author's note, and sources"--
20) River Jordan
Author
Language
English
Description
"[The] South blooms again in Augusta Trobaugh's River Jordan." -The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Sometimes a family grows from the most unlikely of friends.
A lonely little girl living with a strict stepfather and mother. A woman just released from prison, seeking a job and a new purpose for her life. An aging matriarch with a sense of humor and a compassionate heart. Sit a spell by the gentle river of their merged lives.
By the acclaimed...
Sometimes a family grows from the most unlikely of friends.
A lonely little girl living with a strict stepfather and mother. A woman just released from prison, seeking a job and a new purpose for her life. An aging matriarch with a sense of humor and a compassionate heart. Sit a spell by the gentle river of their merged lives.
By the acclaimed...
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