Catalog Search Results
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Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"Newlyweds Celestial and Roy, the living embodiment of the New South, are settling into the routine of their life together when Roy is sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit. An insightful look into the lives of people who are bound and separated by forces beyond their control"--
2) Mrs. Wiggins
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Formats
Description
"The daughter of a prostitute mother and an alcoholic father, Maggie Franklin knew her only way out was to marry someone upstanding and church-going. Someone like Hubert Wiggins, the most eligible man in Lexington, Alabama--and the son of its most revered preacher. Proper and prosperous, Hubert is glad to finally have a wife, even one with Maggie's background. For Hubert has a secret he desperately needs to stay hidden. And Maggie's unexpected charm,...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In 1925, Josephine is the proud owner of a thriving farm. As a child, she channeled otherworldly power to free herself from slavery. Now, her new neighbor, a white woman named Charlotte, seeks her company, and an uneasy friendship grows between them. But Charlotte has also sought solace in the Ku Klux Klan, a relationship that jeopardizes Josephine's family. Nearly one hundred years later, Josephine's descendant, Ava, is a single mother who has just...
Author
Language
English
Description
"In the summer of 1995, ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father's violence to the only place they have left: her mother's ancestral home in Memphis. Half a century ago, Joan's grandfather built this majestic house for her grandmother--only to be lynched, days after becoming the first Black detective in Memphis, by his all-white police squad. This wasn't the first time violence altered the course of Joan's family's trajectory,...
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Formats
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
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Description
"Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader's guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.6 - AR Pts: 12
Language
English
Formats
Description
When you look like us-brown skin, brown eyes, black braids or fades-everyone else thinks you're trouble. No one even blinks twice over a missing black girl from public housing because she must've brought whatever happened to her upon herself. I, Jay Murphy, can admit that, for a minute, I thought my sister Nicole just got caught up with her boyfriend-a drug dealer-and his friends. But she's been gone too long. Nic, where are you? If I hadn't hung...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Two familes from different social classes are joined together by an unexpected pregnancy and the child that it produces. As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier,...
Author
Publisher
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Pub. Date
2011.
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.9 - AR Pts: 13
Language
English
Description
From the New York Times Bestselling Author of An American Marriage
"A love story . . . Full of perverse wisdom and proud joy . . . Jones's skill for wry understatement never wavers."
-O: The Oprah Magazine
"Silver Sparrow will break your heart before you even know it. Tayari Jones has written a novel filled with characters I'll never forget. This is a book I'll read more than once."
-Judy Blume
With the opening line of Silver Sparrow,...
12) Sweetsmoke
Author
Publisher
Hyperion
Pub. Date
2008.
Language
English
Description
Screenwriter David Fuller spent eight years researching Sweetsmoke, in the process discovering that members of his family fought on both sides of the Civil War. Cassius Howard is a skilled slave, once his master's favorite. But his master Hoke is now little more than a fragile old man, depressed about an ever-shrinking plantation and losing a son to war. When an old freedwoman who once saved Cassius from Hoke's wrath is killed, Cassius risks everything...
Author
Publisher
Arcade Publishing
Pub. Date
2017.
Language
English
Description
"A moving African-American family drama of love and devotion in the face of Alzheimer's disease. 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...
14) Harlem shuffle
Author
Series
Harlem trilogy (Colson Whitehead) volume 1
Language
English
Description
""Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked..." 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...
15) First dawn
Author
Series
Freedom's path volume 1
Language
English
Formats
Description
"A saga of two families that portrays the harsh circumstances and intense courage displayed by African-American sharecroppers and Caucasian men as they formed the towns of Nicodemus and Hill City in the western Kansas prairie during the late nineteenth century"--Provided by publisher.
16) Right beside you
Author
Publisher
Dafina Books, Kensington Publishing Corp
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Description
Felicia Hawkins has a successful career, money in the bank, a solid future... and is hopelessly in love with her co-worker, widower Richard Grimes. Richard has his hands full juggling pre-Christmas work demands and raising two teen daughters. He is drawn to Felicia's calm spirit and determination, and everything they have in common. With messy, well-meaning matchmaking from family and friends, and a long-distance transfer Richard can't refuse, it...
Author
Publisher
Little, Brown
Pub. Date
[1999]
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.5 - AR Pts: 11
Language
English
Description
The acclaimed bestseller, a selection of Oprah’s Book Club that vividly brings to life the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC, circa 1925, and a community reeling from a young girl's tragic death. When five-year-old Clara Bynum drowns in the Potomac River under a seemingly haunted rock outcropping known locally as the Three Sisters, the community must reconcile themselves to the bitter tragedy. Clarke powerfully charts the fallout from Clara’s...
18) Song of Solomon
Author
Series
Everyman's library volume 216
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5 - AR Pts: 14
Language
English
Formats
Description
Macon Dead, Jr., known as Milkman, grows up in "his father's money-haunted, death-haunted house with his silent sisters and strangely passive mother" and with his friend Guitar who is connected to the secret avengers called the Seven Days, falls in love with his cousin Hagar, learns from bootlegging Aunt Pilate, and then heads south, lured by the promise of buried gold and the mysteries of his heritage.
19) Family ties
Author
Publisher
Kensington Pub. Corp
Pub. Date
2010.
Language
English
Description
Hill's Family Ties tells the story of D'Ray Reid, who has put prison behind him and wants to repair his broken relationship with his mother. But when D'Ray comes home, lies and legal troubles haunt his every move.
20) Gabriel's story
Author
Publisher
Doubleday
Pub. Date
[2001]
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.8 - AR Pts: 16
Language
English
Description
In his acclaimed debut novel, Durham adds a new dimension to the frontier narrative. Gabriel, the teenaged son of an emancipated slave, travels west with his mother, who is lured by the promise of unclaimed land. Despising life as a farmer, Gabriel runs away with a dangerous band of cowboys. But hindered by youth and inexperience, he must escape the racism and brutality that surround him.
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