Catalog Search Results
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...
3) 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...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.7 - AR Pts: 15
Lexile measure
840L
Language
English
Description
"Set in South Carolina during the summer of 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three racists in town, they escape to Tiburon, South Carolina--a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters, Lily finds refuge...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
New York Times bestselling author Mary Monroe's heart-stopping tale about a woman who's suffered too much to give up on herself, even if everyone else has. . .
Growing up, Annette Goode thought all men were as low-down as the father who abandoned her, including the boarder who abused her for years and the men she slept with to earn the money she needed to run away from her life. Now, after decades of heartache and severing ties with her
...Author
Language
English
Description
"Raised in Pennsylvania, ... Thandi views the world of her mother's childhood in Johannesburg as both impossibly distant and ever present. She is an outsider wherever she goes, caught between being black and white, American and not. She tries to connect these dislocated pieces of her life, and as her mother succumbs to cancer, Thandi searches for an anchor - someone, or something, to love."--
7) 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...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.4 - AR Pts: 3
Language
English
Description
When August, an anthropologist who has studied the funeral traditions of different cultures, revisits her old neighborhood after her father's death, her reunion with a brother and a chance encounter with an old friend bring back a flood of childhood memories. Flashbacks depict the isolation she felt moving from rural Tennessee to New York and show how her later years were influenced by the black power movement, nearby street violence, her father's...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Ghanaian-American Angela Appiah has checked off all the boxes for the "Perfect Immigrant Daughter." Enroll in an elite medical school; Snag a suitable lawyer/doctor/engineer boyfriend; Surround self with a gaggle of successful and/or loyal friends. But then it quickly all falls apart: her boyfriend dumps her, she bombs the most important exam of her medical career, and her best friend pulls away. And her parents, whose approval seems to hinge on...
10) 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,...
11) 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...
12) Upstate
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.2 - AR Pts: 10
Lexile measure
950L
Language
English
Description
The story of a young couple in love and their struggle to maintain a relationship while the young man is incarcerated for a horrendous crime. In their letters beginning in 1990, Natasha and Antonio look back at their courtship against the landscape of their beloved Harlem.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Yolanda Joe, author of the Blackboard best-seller Bebe's By Golly Wow, crafts a touching novel about returning to your roots to understand where you're headed. Terri Mills' star is on the rise. A smart and ambitious lawyer, she has everything going for her-until her fiancé is unfaithful. Suddenly facing an uncertain future, Terri travels to Arkansas and the bedside of her ailing grandmother, who has plenty of wisdom to share.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Jacqueline Guidry's debut novel set in 1950s Louisiana was selected for the PEN/Faulkner Writers in Schools program and has been favorably compared to To Kill a Mockingbird. Ten-year-old Vivien Leigh wants more than anything to understand the adult world. But when two black nuns come to teach at her all-white Catholic elementary school, everything begins to change. She and her sister are suddenly exposed to the harsh realities of racial segregation....
15) Eden
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
A fourteen-year-old African-American girl in Mississippi is sent to care for her cancer-stricken aunt on the other side of town, where she learns about crime, brutal forms of "justice," and dignity in death.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Eve Mann arrives in Ideal, Georgia, in 1972, looking for answers about the mother who died giving her life. A mother named Mercy. A mother who for all of Eve's twenty-two years has been a mystery and a quest. Eve's search for her mother, and the father she never knew, is a mission to discover her identity, her name, her people, her home. Eve's questions and longing launch a multigenerational story that sprawls back to the turn of the twentieth century,...
Author
Language
English
Description
Mika Tabor spends much of her time in the care of loved ones, listening to their stories and witnessing their struggles. On Redwood Court, a cul-de-sac in an all-Black working-class suburb of Columbia, South Carolina, she learns important lessons from those who raise her: her exhausted parents, who work long hours at multiple jobs and still make sure their kids experience the adventure of family vacations; her older sister, who, in a house filled...
Author
Language
English
Description
"18-year-old Opal is a young Black woman working as a housekeeper in a small Southern town in the 1930s--and then the Klan descends. A moving story that confronts America's tragic past, When Stars Rain Down is both heartwarming and heart-wrenching. This summer has the potential to change everything. The summer of 1936 in Parsons, Georgia, is unseasonably hot, and Opal Pruitt senses a nameless storm brewing. She hopes this foreboding feeling won't...
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Try our Materials Request Service. Submit Request