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Black History Month (Staff Picks 2024)


Showing 1 - 20 of 20  There are a total of 39 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "Act your age, Eve Brown"
Star rating for Act your age, Eve Brown
Series:
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
"Eve Brown is a certified hot mess. No matter how hard she strives to do right, her life always goes horribly wrong-- so she's given up trying. But when her personal brand of chaos ruins an expensive wedding (someone had to liberate those poor doves), her parents draw the line. It's time for Eve to grow up and prove herself even though she's not entirely sure how. Jacob Wayne is in control. Always. The bed and breakfast owner is on a mission to dominate...
Book cover for "All American boys"
Star rating for All American boys
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
That's the sidewalk graffiti that started it all ... Well, no, actually, a lady tripping over Rashad at the store, making him drop a bag of chips, was what started it all. Because it didn't matter what Rashad said next -- that it was an accident, that he wasn't stealing -- the cop just kept pounding him. Over and over, pummeling him into the pavement. So then Rashad, an ROTC kid with mad art skills, was absent again ... and again ... stuck in a hospital...
Book cover for "All boys aren't blue"
Star rating for All boys aren't blue
Average Rating:
2.6 stars
Description:
In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia. From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young -adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys.
Book cover for "Becoming"
Star rating for Becoming
Average Rating:
4.6 stars
Description:
"An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. When she was a little girl, Michelle Robinson's world was the South Side of Chicago, where she and her brother, Craig, shared a bedroom in their family's upstairs apartment and played catch in the park, and where her parents, Fraser and Marian Robinson, raised her to be outspoken and unafraid. But life soon took her much further afield, from the halls of Princeton,...
Book cover for "Beloved"
Star rating for Beloved
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the...
Book cover for "Between the world and me"
Star rating for Between the world and me
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
"In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race," a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men--bodies exploited through slavery and segregation,...

7. Big

Book cover for "Big"
Star rating for Big
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
Praised for acting like a big girl when she is small, as a young girl grows, "big" becomes a word of criticism, until the girl realizes that she is fine just the way she is. "Once there was a girl. She had a big heart and very big dreams. And it was good. Until it wasn't. The first picture book written and illustrated by award-winning and bestselling creator Vashti Harrison traces a child's journey to self-love and shows the power of words to both...
Book cover for "The bluest eye"
Star rating for The bluest eye
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
Pecola Breedlove, a young eleven-year-old 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 the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dreams grow 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.--From...
Book cover for "Claire of the sea light"
Star rating for Claire of the sea light
Average Rating:
3.2 stars
Description:
Claire Limye ́Lanme ́-- Claire of the Sea Light -- is an enchanting child born into love and tragedy in Ville Rose, Haiti. Claire's mother died in childbirth, and on each of her birthdays Claire is taken by her father, Nozias, to visit her mother's grave. Nozias wonders if he should give away his young daughter to a local shopkeeper, who lost a child of her own, so that Claire can have a better life. But on the night of Claire's seventh birthday,...
Book cover for "Ghost of the innocent man"
Star rating for Ghost of the innocent man
Description:
"When the final gavel clapped in a rural southern courtroom in the summer of 1988, Willie J. Grimes, a gentle spirit with no record of violence, was shocked and devastated to be convicted of first-degree rape and sentenced to life imprisonment. Here is the story of this everyman and his extraordinary quarter-century-long journey to freedom, told in breathtaking and sympathetic detail, from the botched evidence and suspect testimony that led to his...
Book cover for "Giovanni's room"
Star rating for Giovanni's room
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality"--Page 4 of cover. 1950's Paris. After a homosexual experience in adolescence, David represses the impulses he finds unacceptable. In Paris he has an affair with Hella Lincoln, and proposes marriage. She considers his proposal on a trip to Spain, David has an affair lasting several months with Giovanni,...
Book cover for "The hate u give"
Star rating for The hate u give
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
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. "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 balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal...
Book cover for "How long 'til black future month?"
Star rating for How long 'til black future month?
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
N.K. Jemisin is one of the most powerful and acclaimed speculative fiction authors of our time. In the first collection of her evocative short fiction, Jemisin equally challenges and delights readers with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption. In these stories, Jemisin sharply examines modern society, infusing magic into the mundane, and drawing deft parallels in the fantasy realms of her imagination. Dragons and hateful...
Book cover for "Immortal valor"
Star rating for Immortal valor
Description:
Tells the story of seven African American soldiers in World War II who were finally awarded Medals of Honor for their service in 1993 based on the work of a research team at Shaw University in North Carolina.
Book cover for "Invisible man"
Star rating for Invisible man
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
First published in 1952 and immediately hailed as a masterpiece, Invisible Man is one of those rare novels that have changed the shape of American literature. For not only does Ralph Ellison's nightmare journey across the racial divide tell unparalleled truths about the nature of bigotry and its effects on the minds of both victims and perpetrators, it gives us an entirely new model of what a novel can be. As he journeys from the Deep South to the...
Book cover for "Linden Hills"
Star rating for Linden Hills
Description:
The National Book Award–winning author of The Women of Brewster Place explores the secrets of an affluent black community. For its wealthy African American residents, the exclusive neighborhood of Linden Hills is a symbol of "making it." The ultimate achievement: a home on prestigious Tupelo Drive. Making your way downhill to Tupelo is irrefutable proof of your worth. But the farther down the hill you go, the emptier you become . . . ...
Book cover for "Song of Solomon"
Star rating for Song of Solomon
Average Rating:
3.2 stars
Description:
Macon Dead, Jr., known as Milkman, grows up in "his father's money-haunted, death-haunted house with his silent sisters and strangely passive mother" and with his friend Guitar who is connected to the secret avengers called the Seven Days, falls in love with his cousin Hagar, learns from bootlegging Aunt Pilate, and then heads south, lured by the promise of buried gold and the mysteries of his heritage.
Book cover for "The street"
Star rating for The street
Description:
"The Street follows the spirited Lutie Johnson, a newly single mother whose efforts to claim a share of the American Dream for herself and her young son meet frustration at every turn in 1940s Harlem. Opening a fresh perspective on the realities and challenges of black, female, working-class life, The Street became the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies"--
Book cover for "Their eyes were watching God"
Star rating for Their eyes were watching God
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is a luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern black woman in the 1930s whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to seventy years. This poetic, graceful love story, rooted in black folk traditions and steeped in mythic realism, celebrates, boldly and brilliantly, African-American culture and heritage....
Book cover for "You're not supposed to die tonight"
Star rating for You're not supposed to die tonight
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Charity has the summer job of her dreams, playing the "final girl" at Camp Mirror Lake. Guests pay to be scared in this full-contact terror game, as Charity and her summer crew recreate scenes from a classic slasher film, Curse of Camp Mirror Lake. The more realistic the fear, the better for business. But on the last weekend of the season, Charity's co-workers begin disappearing. And when one ends up dead, Charity's role as the final girl suddenly...