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...
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Description
Tyler Perry does quadruple duty, playing three characters plus the popular Aunt Madea. Madea is summoned to rural Georgia for a family get-together that turns tragic with an unexpected death. Now it's up to Madea to plan the funeral, hold the family together, and make sure no dirty family secrets get leaked. Of course, in Madea's world nothing ever goes exactly to plan, but she's determined to see it through!
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
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
"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
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
"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...
12) 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...
15) 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...
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...
17) 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.
Pub. Date
[2011]
Language
English
Description
Madea, everyone's favorite wise-cracking, take-no-prisoners grandma, jumps into action when her niece, Shirley, receives distressing news about her health. All Shirley wants is to gather her three adult children around her and share the news as a family. It's up to Madea, with the help of the equally rambunctious Aunt Bam, to gather the clan together and make things right the only way she knows how: with a lot of tough love, laughter, and the revelation...
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...
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