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"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers, a novel inspired by the true story of Malaga Island, an isolated island off the coast of Maine that became one of the first racially integrated towns in the Northeast. In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys' descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated,...
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"It’s the summer of 1964 and three innocent men are brutally murdered for trying to help Black Mississippians secure the right to vote. Against this backdrop, twenty-one year old Violet Richards finds herself in more trouble than she’s ever been in her life. Suffering a brutal attack of her own, she kills the man responsible. But with the color of Violet’s skin, there is no way she can escape Jim Crow justice in Jackson, Mississippi. Before...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.2 - AR Pts: 30
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Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952. A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from...
Author
Pub. Date
[2011]
Formats
Description
A young wounded civil war solider is saved by a passionate neighbor, a woman meets a fiercely human historical character, a poet falls in love with a blind man, and a mysterious traveler comes to town in the year when summer never arrives. At the center of everyone's life is a mysterious garden where only red plants can grow, and where the truth can be found by those who dare to look.
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Formats
Description
"Fred Daniels, a Black man, is picked up by the police after a brutal double murder and tortured until he confesses to a crime he did not commit. After signing a confession, he escapes from custody and flees into the city's sewer system. Includes his companion essay, 'Memories of My Grandmother'."--
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.2 - AR Pts: 8
Appears on list
Description
It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove -- a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others -- who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
8) Moonglow
Author
Formats
Description
Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession of a man the narrator refers to only as "my grandfather." It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and marriage and desire, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at mid-century, and, above all, of the destructive impact - and the creative power - of keeping secrets and telling lies. It is a portrait...
Author
Series
IQ novels volume 6
Pub. Date
2023.
Formats
Description
"Isaiah Quintabe's first love, Grace, has been kidnapped by his sworn enemy, the professional hitman Skip Hanson. Skip is savage and psychotic, determined to punish Isaiah for sending him to prison and destroying his life. Isaiah and his sometimes partner, ex-hustler Juanell Dodson, together again, must track scant clues through L.A.'s perilous landscape as Grace's predicament grows more uncertain. A complication arises in the form of Winnie Hando,...
10) Erasure: a novel
Author
Pub. Date
[2001]
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.7 - AR Pts: 13
Description
"Thelonious 'Monk' Ellison’s writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been 'critically acclaimed.' He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited 'some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days.' Meanwhile, Monk struggles...
11) The black pearl
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 5.4 - AR Pts: 4
Description
A sixteen-year-old boy relates his discovery of the Pearl of Heaven and his near-fatal encounter with the feared sea monster, Manta Diablo.
Author
Series
Logan family (Mildred D. Taylor) volume 1
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 3.8 - AR Pts: 1
Description
During the Depression, a rural African-American family deeply attached to the forest on their land tries to save it from being cut down by an unscrupulous white man.
13) The birdcatcher
Author
Formats
Description
"Set primarily on the island of Ibiza, the story is narrated by the writer Amanda Wordlaw, whose closest friend, a gifted sculptor named Catherine Shuger, is repeatedly institutionalized for trying to kill a husband who never leaves her. The three form a quirky triangle on the white-washed island"--
14) The skin I'm in
Author
Series
The skin I'm in novels volume 1
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG+ - BL: 4.1 - AR Pts: 4
Description
Maleeka suffers every day from the taunts of the other kids in her class. If they're not getting at her about her homemade clothes or her good grades, it's about her dark, black skin. When a new teacher, whose face is blotched with a startling white patch, starts at their school, Maleeka can see there is bound to be trouble for her too. But the new teacher's attitude surprises Maleeka. Miss Saunders loves the skin she's in. Can Maleeka learn to do...
15) Palmares
Author
Formats
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"The epic rendering of a Black woman's journey through slavery and liberation, set in 17th-century colonial Brazil"--
Intricate and compelling, Palmares recounts the journey of Almeyda, a Black slave girl who comes of age on Portuguese plantations and escapes to a fugitive slave settlement called Palmares. Following its destruction, Almeyda embarks on a journey across colonial Brazil to find her husband, lost in battle.
Her story brings to life a...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6 - AR Pts: 18
Appears on these lists
Formats
Description
"Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery. Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the...
17) Beloved
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6 - AR Pts: 15
Appears on these lists
Description
After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the...
Author
Series
The Color Purple volume 2
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.5 - AR Pts: 23
Description
Three couples, two in crisis, talk about themselves and reconstruct the missing pieces of the past and in the end, they deeply affect one another. Transcending the conventions of time and place, Walker's novel moves from contemporary America, England, and Africa to unfamiliar primal worlds, where women, men, and animals socialize in surprising ways. The author of The Color Purple has created a mesmerizing novel of vision and spirit.
19) Someday, maybe
Author
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Description
After her husband, the greatest love of her life, commits suicide, a young woman finds the strength to move on with the help of her tight-knit Nigerian family and happy memories of the man she'll never forget.
Here are three things you should know about my husband:
He was the great love of my life despite his penchant for going incommunicado.
He was, as far as I and everyone else could tell, perfectly happy. Which is significant because…
On...