Bahni Turpin
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Description
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway,...
Author
Description
"A current, constructive, and actionable exploration of today's racial landscape, offering straightforward clarity that readers of all races need to contribute to the dismantling of the racial divide. In So You Want to Talk About Race, Editor at Large of The Establishment, Ijeoma Oluo offers a contemporary, accessible take on the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions,...
Author
Description
"The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Small Great Things returns with a powerful and provocative new novel about ordinary lives that intersect during a heart-stopping crisis. The warm fall day starts like any other at the Center a women's reproductive health services clinic its staff offering care to anyone who passes through its doors. Then, in late morning, a desperate and distraught gunman bursts in and opens fire, taking all inside hostage....
Author
Description
Yaa Gyasi's stunning follow-up to her acclaimed national best seller Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama. Gifty is a fifth year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked...
Author
Series
Legacy of Orisha volume 1
Pub. Date
2018.
Appears on list
Description
Seventeen-year-old Zélie, her older brother Tzain, and rogue princess Amari fight to restore magic to the land and activate a new generation of magi, but they are ruthlessly pursued by the crown prince, who believes the return of magic will mean the end of the monarchy.
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Series
Kitchen house volume 1
Description
"In 1790, Lavinia, a seven-year-old Irish orphan with no memory of her past, arrives on a tobacco plantation where she is put to work as an indentured servant with the kitchen house slaves. Though she becomes deeply bonded to her new family, Lavinia is also slowly accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. As time passes she finds herself perilously straddling two very different worlds...
Author
Series
Legacy of Orisha volume 2
Description
After Zélie and Amari bring magic back to the land of Orïsha, the monarchy and military unite to keep control of Orïsha, forcing Zélie to fight to secure Amari's right to the throne and protect the new maji from the monarchy's wrath.
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Description
2004: Lina Sparrow, an artist's daughter, is an ambitious young lawyer working on a historic class-action lawsuit seeking reparations for the descendants of American slaves. 1852: Josephine, a seventeen-year-old slave, tends to the mistress of a Virginia tobacco farm - an aspiring artist named Lu Anne Bell. Lina's search to find a plaintiff for her case will introduce her to Josephine's story. Was she the real talent behind her mistress's now-famous...
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Description
The source of self-regard is brimming with all the elegance of mind and style, the literary prowess and moral compass that are Toni Morrison's inimitable hallmark. It is divided into three parts: the first is introduced by a powerful prayer for the dead of 9/11; the second by a searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., and the last by a heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. In the writings and speeches included here, Morrison takes on contested...
10) A comb of wishes
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Description
Twelve-year-old Kela is still mourning her mother when she finds a mermaid's comb while she and her friend are looking for sea glass on her Caribbean island; such combs have magic in them, and touching it opens a connection to the mermaid Ophidia who can grant her wish, to bring her mother back to life--but all wishes have consequences, and magic demands a price which may prove to be more painful than the loss of her mother.
11) The help
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Description
In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, there are lines that are not crossed. With the civil rights movement exploding all around them, three women start a movement of their own, forever changing a town and the way women--black and white, mothers and daughters--view one another.
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Description
"Evie Thomas doesn't believe in love anymore. Especially after the strangest thing occurs one otherwise ordinary afternoon: She witnesses a couple kiss and is overcome with a vision of how their romance began... and how it will end. After all, even the greatest love stories end with a broken heart, eventually. As Evie tries to understand why this is happening, she finds herself at La Brea Dance studio, learning to waltz, fox-trot, and tango with a...
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Series
Smek (Adam Rex) volume 1
Description
When her mother is abducted by aliens on Christmas Eve (or "Smekday" Eve since the Boov invasion), 11 year-old Tip hops in the family car and heads south to find her and meets an alien Boov mechanic who agrees to help her and save the planet from disaster.
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Description
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer and viruses; helped lead to in vitro...
15) The hate u give
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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.
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Description
"My disease is as rare as it is famous. Basically, I'm allergic to the world. I don't leave my house, have not left my house in seventeen years. The only people I ever see are my mom and my nurse, Carla. But then one day, a moving truck arrives next door. I look out my window, and I see him. He's tall, lean and wearing all black -- black T-shirt, black jeans, black sneakers, and a black knit cap that covers his hair completely. He catches me looking...
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Description
The compelling, hidden story of Cathy Williams, a former slave and the first woman to ever serve in the US Army.
"Here's the first thing you need to know about Miss Cathy Williams: I am the daughter of a daughter of a queen and my Mama never let me forget it." Cathy Williams was born and lived a slave until the Union army came and destroyed the only world she had ever known. Separated from her family, she makes the impossible decision: to fight with...
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"Former Navy SEAL Peter "Grunge" Greene's lonely but comfortable life is upended when his longtime ex-girlfriend unexpectedly dies in a car crash, leaving him sole custody of their 15-year-old daughter, Maddie. They move to San Diego to start a new life together, but Maddie quickly falls in with the wrong crowd and soon goes completely AWOL. New to town with no one to turn to, Peter is frantic to track down his daughter and accepts help from his beautiful...
20) The starless sea
Author
Description
"Zachary Ezra Rawlins is a graduate student in Vermont when he discovers a rare book hidden in the stacks. As he turns the pages, entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, key collectors, and nameless acolytes, he reads something strange: a story from his own childhood. Bewildered by this inexplicable book and desperate to make sense of how his own life came to be recorded, Zachary uncovers a series of clues--a bee, a key, and a sword--that lead him...