Catalog Search Results
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Language
English
Formats
Description
"A dazzling, unforgettable novel about a young Black woman who walks the streets of Oakland and stumbles headlong into the failure of its justice system--a debut that announces a blazingly original voice. Kiara Johnson and her brother Marcus are barely scraping by in a squalid East Oakland apartment complex that calls itself, optimistically, the Royal-Hi. Both have dropped out of high school, their family fractured by death and prison. But while Marcus...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
2018 - 100 Most Popular Books, DVDs and Magazines
2019 - Most Popular Fiction
Interconnected Short Stories
More Lists...
2019 - Most Popular Fiction
Interconnected Short Stories
More Lists...
Description
"Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into two different tribal villages in 18th century Ghana. Effia will be married off to an English colonial, and will live in comfort in the sprawling, palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising half-caste children who will be sent abroad to be educated in England before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the Empire. Her sister, Esi, will be imprisoned beneath...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The great scholar, W.E.B. Du Bois, once wrote about what he called "Double Consciousness," a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that's made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma. To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family's past. In doing so Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
2020 - Most Popular 100
2020 - Most Popular Adult Fiction
NYT - Combined Print & E-Book Fiction
More Lists...
2020 - Most Popular Adult Fiction
NYT - Combined Print & E-Book Fiction
More Lists...
Description
In the small Florida town of Seabrook, a young lawyer named Keith Russo was shot dead at his desk as he worked late one night. The killer left no clues. There were no witnesses, no one with a motive. But the police soon came to suspect Quincy Miller, a young black man who was once a client of Russo's. Quincy was tried, convicted, and sent to prison for life. For twenty-two years he languished in prison, maintaining his innocence. But no one was...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
2019 - 100 Most Popular Books, DVDs and Magazines
2019 - Most Popular Fiction
2020 - Most Popular 100
More Lists...
2019 - Most Popular Fiction
2020 - Most Popular 100
More Lists...
Formats
Description
As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is "as good as anyone." Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South of the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Elwood...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
2018 - 100 Most Popular Books, DVDs and Magazines
2019 - Most Popular Fiction
Featured List of Authors for Black History Month 2019
More Lists...
2019 - Most Popular Fiction
Featured List of Authors for Black History Month 2019
More Lists...
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
Pub. Date
2018.
Language
English
Appears on these lists
2018 - 100 Most Popular Books, DVDs and Magazines
2019 - 100 Most Popular Books, DVDs and Magazines
2019 - Most Popular Fiction
More Lists...
2019 - 100 Most Popular Books, DVDs and Magazines
2019 - Most Popular Fiction
More Lists...
Description
Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
10 Worth Trying: Young Adult Realistic Fiction [High School Readers]
2019 - 100 Most Popular Books, DVDs and Magazines
2019 - Most Popular YA
More Lists...
2019 - 100 Most Popular Books, DVDs and Magazines
2019 - Most Popular YA
More Lists...
Description
Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, Angie Thomas's searing debut about an ordinary girl in extraordinary circumstances addresses issues of racism and police violence with intelligence, heart, and unflinching honesty. Soon to be a major motion picture from Fox 2000/Temple Hill Productions. Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in.Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
In Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and urgent: since Mott’s novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.As these characters’ stories build and...
11) Invisible man
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
In the course of his wanderings from a Southern Negro college to New York's Harlem, an American black man becomes involved in a series of adventures. Introduction explains circumstances under which the book was written. Ellison won the National Book Award for this searing record of a black man's journey through contemporary America. Unquestionably, Ellison's book is a work of extraordinary intensity--powerfully imagined and written with a savage,...
12) The reckoning
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
2019 - 100 Most Popular Books, DVDs and Magazines
2019 - Most Popular Fiction
Most Popular Fiction Books of 2019
2019 - Most Popular Fiction
Most Popular Fiction Books of 2019
Description
Pete Banning was Clanton's favorite son, a returning war hero, the patriarch of a prominent family, a farmer, father, neighbor, and a faithful member of the Methodist church. Then one cool October morning in 1946. he rose early, drove into town, walked into the church, and calmly shot and killed the Reverend Dexter Bell. As if the murder wasn't shocking enough, it was even more baffling that Pete's only statement about it - to the sheriff, to his...
13) Home
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"The story of a Korean war veteran on a quest to save his younger sister"--
When Frank Money joined the army to escape his too-small world, he left behind his cherished and fragile little sister, Cee. After the war, his shattered life has no purpose until he hears that Cee is in danger. Frank is a modern Odysseus returning to a 1950s America mined with lethal pitfalls for an unwary black man. As he journeys to his native Georgia in search of Cee,...
14) Red at the bone
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Family Gatherings
New Books Featured in the Monthly Library eNewsletter
Read-Alikes for Olga Dies Dreaming
More Lists...
New Books Featured in the Monthly Library eNewsletter
Read-Alikes for Olga Dies Dreaming
More Lists...
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
Series
Vanderbeekers volume 1
Pub. Date
2017.
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Authors with Asian Heritage: Books for Elementary
Authors with Asian Heritage: Books for Middle Grade
Authors with Asian Heritage: Books for Middle Grade
Formats
Description
Told that they will have to move out of their Harlem brownstone just after Christmas, the five Vanderbeeker children, ages four to twelve, decide to change their reclusive landlord's mind.
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on these lists
2019 - Most Popular Picture Books
2020 - The Most Popular Picture Books
Newbery Medal Award Winners
Three, Four Tell Me More: My Family
2020 - The Most Popular Picture Books
Newbery Medal Award Winners
Three, Four Tell Me More: My Family
Description
Every Sunday after church, CJ and his grandma ride the bus across town. But today, CJ wonders why they don't own a car like his friend Colby. Why doesn't he have an iPod like the boys on the bus? How come they always have to get off in the dirty part of town? Each question is met with an encouraging answer from grandma, who helps him see the beauty-and fun-in their routine and the world around them. -- from Amazon.
17) On the come up
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Formats
Description
Sixteen-year-old Bri wants to be one of the greatest rappers of all time. Or at least win her first battle. As the daughter of an underground hip hop legend who died right before he hit big, Bri's got massive shoes to fill. But it's hard to get your come up when you're labeled a hoodlum at school, and your fridge at home is empty after your mom loses her job. So Bri pours her anger and frustration into her first song, which goes viral...for all the...
Author
Series
Amari volume 1
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
Amari Peters has never stopped believing her missing brother, Quinton, is alive. Not even when the police told her otherwise, or when she got in trouble for standing up to bullies who said he was gone for good. So when she finds a ticking briefcase in his closet, containing a nomination for a summer tryout at the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs, she’s certain the secretive organization holds the key to locating Quinton—if only she can wrap her...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
The story of John, a fourteen-year-old boy whose stepfather is a Pentecostal minister in Harlem in 1935, as he struggles to discover his own identity.
"Mountain," Baldwin said, "is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else." Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating...
20) Black Buck
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Formats
Description
"Darren lives in a Bed-Stuy brownstone with his mother, content working at Starbucks in the lobby of a Midtown office building, hanging out with his girlfriend, Soraya, and eating his mother's home-cooked meals. A chance encounter with Rhett Daniels, CEO of Sumwun, NYC's hottest tech startup, results in an exclusive invitation for Darren to join an elite sales team on the thirty-sixth floor. As the only Black person in the company, Darren reimagines...
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Try our Materials Request Service. Submit Request