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1) Beloved
Author
Language
English
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Description
Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose...
Author
Language
English
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Description
"From Percival Everett-a recipient of the NBCC Lifetime Achievement Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Booker Prize, and numerous PEN awards-comes James, a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby...
3) Kindred
Author
Series
Language
English
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Description
Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned across the years to save him. After this first summons, Dana is drawn back, again and again, to the plantation to protect Rufus and ensure that he will grow to manhood and father...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
1852. Josephine Bell decides to run from the failing tobacco farm where she is a slave and nurse to her ailing mistress, the aspiring artist Lu Anne Bell. New York City, 2004. Are the iconic paintings long ascribed to Lu Anne Bell really the work of her house slave, Josephine?
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
Born a slave on the island of Saint-Domingue, ZaritÉ -- known as TÉtÉ -- is the daughter of an African mother she never knew and one of the white sailors who brought her into bondage. Though her childhood is one of brutality and fear, TÉtÉ finds solace in the traditional rhythms of African drums and in the voodoo loas she discovers through her fellow slaves. When twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770, it's with powdered...
Author
Language
English
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Description
The brutal double murder of renowned scientist George Benham and his eccentric French wife, Marguerite, has set London abuzz. Crowds pack the courtroom, the newspapers print lurid theories about the killings. But Frannie Langton claims she cannot recall what happened that evening, how she came to be covered in blood. She does have a tale to tell: a story of her childhood on a Jamaican plantation, her apprenticeship under a debauched scientist who...
Author
Language
English
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Description
A magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.
Cora is a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood-where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes...
Author
Language
English
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Arlington Reads: Classics Rebooted
Columbia Pike Teen Book Club - Sep 2023 - Banned Books
Read-Alikes for James
Columbia Pike Teen Book Club - Sep 2023 - Banned Books
Read-Alikes for James
Description
"The classic boyhood adventure tale, updated with a new introduction by noted Mark Twain scholar R. Kent Rasmussen In recent years, neither the persistent effort to "clean up" the racial epithets in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn nor its consistent use in the classroom have diminished, highlighting the novel's wide-ranging influence and its continued importance in American society. An incomparable adventure story, it is a vignette of...
Author
Series
I survived volume 7
Language
English
Description
"It's 1863, and Thomas and his little sister, Birdie, have fled the farm where they were born and raised as slaves. Following the North Star, looking for freedom, they soon cross paths with a Union soldier. Everything changes: Corporal Henry Green brings Thomas and Birdie back to his regiment, and suddenly it feels like they've found a new home. Best of all, they don't have to find their way north alone--they're marching with the army. But then orders...
Author
Language
English
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Description
Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1857, when the region is a battleground between anti- and pro-slavery forces. When John Brown, the legendary abolitionist, arrives in the area, an argument between Brown and Henry's master quickly turns violent. Henry is forced to leave town-with Brown, who believes he's a girl. Over the ensuing months, Henry-whom Brown nicknames Little Onion-conceals his true identity as he struggles...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"A singular and stunning debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence"--
Isaiah was Samuel's and Samuel was Isaiah's. In the barn they tended to the animals, but also to each other, transforming the hollowed-out shed into a place of human refuge, a source of intimacy and hope in a world ruled by vicious masters. When...
Author
Series
Queen's thief volume 5
Language
English
Description
"Kamet, a secretary and slave to his Mede master, has the ambition and the means to become one of the most powerful people in the Empire. But with a whispered warning the future he envisioned is wrenched away, and he is forced onto a very different path"--
14) Sacred hunger
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
En route to America with a cargo of African slaves, the crew of the Liverpool Merchant, enraged at the captain's impotence in the face of disease, carry out a mutiny that pits two cousins against each other.
Author
Series
Pulitzer prize in fiction volume 1968
Language
English
Formats
Description
"The Confessions of Nat Turner reveals in unforgettable human terms the agonizing essence of Negro slavery. Through the mind of a slave, William Styron has re-created a catastrophic event, and dramatized the intermingled miseries, frustrations-and hopes-which caused this extraordinary black man to rise up out of the early mists of our history and strike down those who had held his people in bondage."
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"Georgeanna 'Georgey' Woolsey isn’t meant for the world of lavish parties and the demure attitudes of women of her stature. So when war ignites the nation, Georgey follows her passion for nursing during a time when doctors considered women on the battlefront a bother. In proving them wrong, she and her sister Eliza venture from New York to Washington, D.C., to Gettysburg and witness the unparalleled horrors of slavery as they become involved in...
17) Choke point
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Hired to investigate allegations of a sweat-shop operation in Amsterdam that is enslaving young girls, Knox and tech information expert Grace Chu embark on a rescue mission that is challenged by a crime organization that has seduced local neighborhoods with showy goodwill practices.
18) Riddley Walker
Author
Publisher
Indiana University Press
Language
English
Formats
Description
Set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), Hoban has imagined a humanity regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state--and invented a language to represent it. Riddley is at once the Huck Finn and the Stephen Dedalus of his culture--rebel, change agent, and artist. Read again or for the first time this masterpiece of 20th-century literature with new material by the author.--From publisher description.
19) The indigo girl
Author
Language
English
Description
The story of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, who ran her father's plantation outside Charleston, South Carolina in the 1700s and struck a bargain with the plantation's slaves--teach her how to make indigo and she would teach them to read.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
A powerful and haunting novel of desire and devastating greed. Set in 18th-century Bristol, this novel charts one man's efforts to move to the wealthy sector of the city - at any cost. To this end, he becomes involved in slave-trading. This is a tale of his ambition, and the plight of one African in particular, brought over to be trained as a model slave.
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