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English
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Description
"Cedric The Entertainer's debut novel Flipping Boxcars is a valentine to close-knit black families and tightly woven communities during the Depression and World War II. The story is also an homage to Cedric's grandfather, who in this tale emerges as Babe.He is a charismatic and widely loved man. He is also a gambler, whose gift of gab often gets him out of tricky situations, which is often. Babe is also a dreamer, something he shares in common with...
Author
Language
English
Description
"A father’s sudden disappearance exposes the private fears, dreams, longings, and joys of a Black American family in the late decades of the twentieth century, in this page-turning and intimate new novel from the author of The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls. It’s a warm, bright October afternoon, and Ozro Armstead walks out into the brilliant sunshine on his thirty-seventh birthday. At home, his wife Deborah and daughter...
Author
Language
English
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Description
"A powerful, timely debut, The Turner House marks a major new contribution to the story of the American family. The Turners have lived on Yarrow Street for over fifty years. Their house has seen thirteen children grown and gone--and some returned; it has seen the arrival of grandchildren, the fall of Detroit's East Side, and the loss of a father. The house still stands despite abandoned lots, an embattled city, and the inevitable shift outward to...
Author
Language
English
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Description
When her new husband artist takes is arrested and imprisoned for a crime she knows he did not commit, a rising comfort in a longtime friendship, only to encounter unexpected challenges in resuming her life when her husband's sentence is suddenly overturned.
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...
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
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Description
To come to terms with who she is and what she wants, Ailey, the daughter of an accomplished doctor and a strict schoolteacher, embarks on a journey through her family's past, helping her embrace her full heritage, which is the story of the Black experience in itself.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.9 - AR Pts: 13
Language
English
Appears on these lists
'The Color Purple' Read Alikes
Fiction by Black Authors
Read-Alikes for The Vanishing Half
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Fiction by Black Authors
Read-Alikes for The Vanishing Half
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Description
"With the opening line of Silver Sparrow, My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist, author Tayari Jones unveils a ...story about a man s deception, a family's complicity, and two teenage girls caught in the middle. Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon's two families the public one and the secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them...
Author
Language
English
Description
Ptolemy Grey is a 91-year-old man, suffering from dementia and living as a recluse in his Los Angeles apartment. Then Robyn Small, a 17-year-old family friend, appears and helps clean up his apartment and straighten out his life. A reinvigorated Ptolemy volunteers for an experimental medical program that restores his mind, and he uses his last days--shortened now by the medical experiment--to delve into the mystery of the recent drive-by shooting...
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
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Description
"One of the most prominent voices of her generation debuts with an extraordinarily powerful memoir: the story of a childhood defined by the ever looming absence of her incarcerated father and the path we must take to both honor and overcome our origins. For as long as she could remember, Ashley has put her father on a pedestal. Despite having only vague memories of seeing him face-to-face, she believes he's the only person in the entire world who...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.4 - AR Pts: 12
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait...
12) The yellow house
Author
Language
English
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Description
"In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and Built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant-- the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah's father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number 12 children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah's birth,...
Author
Language
English
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Description
Discusses the story of the Hemingses, an American slave family that had blood ties to Thomas Jefferson, who had an intimate relationship with Sally Hemings, his slave, and covers how the family of Elizabeth Hemings and John Wayles came under ownership to Jefferson through his marriage to Martha Wayles.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.3 - AR Pts: 13
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
Enduring a hardscrabble existence as the children of alcoholic and absent parents, four siblings from a coastal Mississippi town prepare their meager stores for the arrival of Hurricane Katrina while struggling with such challenges as a teen pregnancy and a dying litter of prize pups.
Author
Publisher
Little, Brown and Company
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
An homage to the author's mother relates how she cleverly played Detroit's illegal lottery in the 1970s to support the family while creating a loving, joyful home and mothering her children to the highest standards.
16) Root magic
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 4.6 - AR Pts: 12
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"It's 1963, and things are changing for Jezebel Turner. Her beloved grandmother has just passed away. The local police deputy won't stop harassing her family. With school integration arriving in South Carolina, Jez and her twin brother, Jay, are about to begin the school year with a bunch of new kids. But the biggest change comes when Jez and Jay turn eleven and their uncle, Doc, tells them he's going to train them in rootwork. Jez and Jay have always...
17) How far to the promised land: one black family's story of hope and survival in the American South
Author
Language
English
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Description
"From the New York Times contributing opinion writer and award-winning author of Reading While Black, a riveting intergenerational account of his family's search for meaning and a place to call home in the American South. For much of his life, Esau McCaulley was taught to see himself as an exception: someone who, through hard work, faith, and determination, overcame childhood poverty, anti-Black racism, and an absent father to earn a job as a university...
Author
Language
English
Description
"A new edition of this award-winning modern classic, with new introduction, excerpt, and discussion guide Pakersfield, Georgia, 1958: Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn is the sixth of ten fatherless siblings. She is the darkest-skinned among them and therefore the ugliest in her mother, Rozelle's, estimation, but she's also the brightest. Rozelle--beautiful, charismatic, and light-skinned--exercises a violent hold over her children. Fearing abandonment,...
Author
Language
English
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Description
"A history of the rise and lasting impact of Black liberation groups in America, as seen through the Shakurs, one of the movement's most prominent and fiercely creative families, home to Tupac and Assata, and a powerful incubator for today's activism, scholarship, and artistry"--
"An Amerikan Family is a light helping us go forward.” — Nikki Giovanni, poet An enlightening history of the rise and lasting impact of Black liberation groups in America,...
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