Allyson Johnson
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Language
English
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Description
"Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV--everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come...
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Description
"Fearful of violating Indiana's anti-miscegenation laws in the 1940s, E. Dolores Johnson's black father and white mother fled Indianapolis to secretly marry. Johnson searched her father's black genealogy and then was amazed to suddenly realize that her mother's whole white side was missing in family history. Johnson went searching for the white family who did not know she existed. When she found them, it's not just their shock and her mother's shame...
3) Seaview Inn
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Hannah Matthews prides herself on being able to handle any crisis. But with her grandmother balking at going into a retirement home, her daughter unexpectedly pregnant and an old flame suddenly underfoot, Hannah is facing a few crises of her own. And being back home on Seaview Key is most definitely adding to the stress.
Author
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English
Description
"Novel set in the south during the Great Depression that takes an entirely fresh view on big American themes-- race, heredity, inequality, shame-- set in a time of financial crisis and racialized violence"--
"Cotton County, Georgia, 1930: In a house full of secrets, two babies - one light-skinned, the other dark - are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper's daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a...
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English
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Description
In an age defined by hyper-connectivity and constant stimulation, Francine Prose makes a compelling case for the solitary act of reading and the great enjoyment it brings. Inspiring and illuminating, What to Read and Why includes selections culled from Prose's previous essays, reviews, and introductions, combined with new, never-before-published pieces that focus on her favorite works of fiction and nonfiction, on works by masters of the short story,...
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English
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"'We should have known the end was near.' So begins Imbolo Mbue's exquisite and devastating novel How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by a large and powerful American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean up and financial reparations to the...
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English
Description
Two decades before the Civil War, a middle-class farmer named Samuel Maddox lies on his deathbed. Elsewhere in his Virginia home, a young woman named Kitty knows her life is about to change. She is one of the Maddox family's slaves--and Samuel's biological daughter. When Samuel's wife, Mary, inherits her husband's property, she will own Kitty, too, along with Kitty's three small children. Already in her fifties and with no children of her own, Mary...
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Seaview Key volume 2
Language
English
Description
"Falling for a handsome stranger on the very morning they meet is hardly what recently divorced Abby Miller planned for her return to Seaview Key. Hoping to mend an old friendship and to give back to the community she loves, Abby's definitely not looking for love. For ex-soldier Seth Landry, Seaview Key seems like the perfect place to heal a broken heart-- eventually. And when he rescues a beautiful woman on the beach, his nightmares about the past...
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Series
Logan family (Mildred D. Taylor) volume 9
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English
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Description
"Cassie Logan, first met in Song of the Trees and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, is a young woman now, searching for her place in the world, a journey that takes her from Toledo to California, to law school in Boston, and, ultimately, in the 60s, home to Mississippi to participate in voter registration. She is witness to the now-historic events of the century: the Great Migration north, the rise of the civil rights movement, preceded and precipitated...
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English
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"An engrossing, epic American drama told from four distinct perspectives, spanning the first major wave of Irish immigration to New York through the end of the Civil War. Four unique voices; two parallel love stories; one sweeping novel rich in the history of nineteenth century America. This remarkable debut draws from the great themes of literature--famine, war, love, and family--as it introduces four unforgettable characters. Ethan McOwen is an...
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English
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"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. "The dead can't hurt you--only the living can." 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,...
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Michaela DePrince was known as girl Number 27 at the orphanage, where she was abandoned at a young age and tormented as a “devil child” for a skin condition that makes her skin appear spotted. But it was at the orphanage that Michaela would find a picture of a beautiful ballerina en pointe that would help change the course of her life. In this engaging, moving, and unforgettable memoir, Michaela shares her dramatic journey from an orphan in West...
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An account of poverty in America so deep that we, as a country, don't think it exists. Jessica Compton's family of four would have no cash income unless she donated plasma twice a week at her local donation center in Tennessee. Modonna Harris and her teenage daughter Brianna in Chicago, often have no food but spoiled milk on weekends. After two decades of research on American poverty, Kathryn Edin noticed something she hadn't seen since the mid-1990s...
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Sourcebooks
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English
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Description
"When Nefertiti Austin, a single African-American woman, decided to adopt two black children through the foster system, she was unprepared for the fact that there is no place for black women in the 'mommy wars.' Austin set off on her path with no place to seek guidance from others who looked like her or shared her experience. She soon realized that she would not only have to navigate skepticism from the adoption community, who deal almost exclusively...
17) Everfair
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Series
Everfair volume 1
Language
English
Description
"From acclaimed short fiction writer Nisi Shawl comes a thought-provoking alternate history set in the Congo, where heroes strive for a Utopia and endeavor to live together despite their differences. In this reimagining of Belgium's disastrous colonization of the Congo, African American missionaries join forces with British socialists to purchase land from the Congo Free State's "owner," King Leopold II. This land, which they name Everfair, is set...
18) Chicken Sunday
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English
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Description
To thank Miss Eula for her wonderful Sunday chicken dinners, three children sell decorated eggs to buy her a beautiful Easter hat.
19) Tomorrow's bread
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English
Description
From the author of the acclaimed The Dry Grass of August comes a richly researched yet lyrical Southern-set novel that explores the conflicts of gentrification--a moving story of loss, love, and resilience. In 1961 Charlotte, North Carolina, the predominantly black neighborhood of Brooklyn is a bustling city within a city. Self-contained and vibrant, it has its own restaurants, schools, theaters, churches, and night clubs. There are shotgun shacks...