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Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"Fifteen-year-old Ruby Pearsall is on track to becoming the first in her family to attend college, in spite of having a mother more interested in keeping a man than raising a daughter. But a taboo love affair threatens to pull her back down into the poverty and desperation that has been passed on to her like a birthright... Eleanor Quarles arrives in Washington, DC, with ambition and secrets. When she meets the handsome William Pride at Howard University,...
2) Beloved
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6 - AR Pts: 15
Language
English
Description
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A spellbinding novel that transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. With a new afterword by the author.
This "brutally powerful, mesmerizing story” (People) is an unflinchingly look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner.
Sethe was born a slave and escaped...
This "brutally powerful, mesmerizing story” (People) is an unflinchingly look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner.
Sethe was born a slave and escaped...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6 - AR Pts: 16
Language
English
Description
In the small north 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 behind. There were no witnesses, no real suspects, no one with a motive. The police soon settled on Quincy Miller, a young black man who was once a client of Russos. Quincy was framed, convicted, and sent to prison for life. For twenty-two years he languished in prison with no lawyer, no advocate...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.2 - AR Pts: 8
Language
English
Description
Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, people will notice her, and her world will be different. The story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, the tragic heroine of Toni Morrison's haunting first novel, grew out of her memory of a girlhood friend who wanted blue eyes. Shunned by the town's...
Author
Series
Crossover (Kwame Alexander) volume 1
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 4.3 - AR Pts: 2
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Middle Grade Spotlight on eBooks & Audiobooks
Spotlight on eBooks and Audiobooks for All Ages
Youth: Award Winners for Grades 3-8
Youth: Recommendations for grades 4-8
Spotlight on eBooks and Audiobooks for All Ages
Youth: Award Winners for Grades 3-8
Youth: Recommendations for grades 4-8
Description
"A bolt of lightning on my kicks ... The court is sizzling. My sweat is drizzling. Stop all that quivering. Cuz tonight I'm delivering," raps basketball phenom Josh Bell. Thanks to his dad, he and his twin brother, Jordan, are kings on the court, with crossovers that make even the toughest ballers cry. But Josh has more than hoops in his blood. He's got a river of rhymes flowing through him - a sick flow that helps him find his rhythm when everything's...
Author
Language
English
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
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.6 - AR Pts: 10
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person--no mean feat for a black woman in the '30s. Janie's quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her roots
10) Legendborn
Author
Series
Legendborn volume 1
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.2 - AR Pts: 24
Language
English
Appears on these lists
2023 Lincoln Award Nominees
Spotlight on eBooks and Audiobooks for All Ages
Teen: Black Voices Matter
More Lists...
Spotlight on eBooks and Audiobooks for All Ages
Teen: Black Voices Matter
More Lists...
Description
"To discover the truth behind her mother's mysterious death, a teen girl infiltrates a magical secret society claiming to be the descendants of King Arthur and his knights"--
After her mother dies in an accident, Bree Matthews wants nothing to do with her family memories or childhood home. A residential program for bright high schoolers at UNC-Chapel Hill seems like the perfect escape-- until Bree witnesses a magical attack her very first night on...
11) Homegoing
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6 - AR Pts: 18
Language
English
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
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 4.9 - AR Pts: 14
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Middle Grade Spotlight on eBooks & Audiobooks
NYT - Middle Grade Paperback
Spotlight on eBooks and Audiobooks for All Ages
More Lists...
NYT - Middle Grade Paperback
Spotlight on eBooks and Audiobooks for All Ages
More Lists...
Description
Thirteen-year-old Amari, a poor Black girl from the projects, gets an invitation from her missing brother to join the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs and join in the fight against an evil magician
13) THE RECKONING
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.9 - AR Pts: 24
Language
English
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...
14) Hair love
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: LG - BL: 2.1 - AR Pts: 1
Language
English
Description
A little girl's daddy steps in to help her arrange her curly, coiling, wild hair into styles that allow her to be her natural, beautiful self
Author
Language
English
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
Series
Baby-sitters Club. Original series volume 16
Publisher
Scholastic Inc
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 3.1 - AR Pts: 1
Language
English
Formats
Description
Feeling isolated as the only African American in her sixth grade class, Jessi gains a sense of belonging by participating in the Baby-sitters Club, learning sign language in order to communicate with a deaf child, and dancing in a ballet
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.5 - AR Pts: 10
Language
English
Description
"In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award-winning The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. 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...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.6 - AR Pts: 7
Language
English
Description
"For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries that surrounded him -- most urgently, why he, and other black people he knew, seemed to live in fear. What were they afraid of? In Tremble for My Country, Coates takes readers along on his journey through America's history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings -- moments...
19) The hate u give
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 3.9 - AR Pts: 13
Language
English
Description
After witnessing her friend's death at the hands of a police officer, Starr Carter's life is complicated when the police and a local drug lord try to intimidate her in an effort to learn what happened the night Kahlil died
Author
Language
English
Description
'How the Word is Passed' is Clint Smith's revealing, contemporary portrait of America as a slave owning nation. Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks - those that are honest about the past and those that are not - that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nations collective history, and ourselves
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