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Black History Month (Staff Picks 2024)


Showing 1 - 20 of 24  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 "As brave as you"
Star rating for As brave as you
Average Rating:
3.2 stars
Description:
"When two brothers decide to prove how brave they are, everything backfires--literally"-- Scooping poop at his grandparent's house - that sure as heck wasn't the way eleven-year-old Genie expected to be spending his summer. But when his parents send him and his big brother, Ernie, to Virginia to experience the great (not!) outdoors, they're in for some big surprises. First, there are chores galore (picking peas, really?). Second, Grandpop just might...
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,...

8. 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 "Colored people"
Star rating for Colored people
Description:
"In this rich memoir of his early life, the celebrated scholar and writer Henry Louis Gates, Jr., gives us an indelible portrait of a vanished America. Born in 1950, he grew up in Piedmont (population 2,565), a West Virginia town perched on the side of a hill in the Allegheny Mountains. He was raised in a small, intimate, middle-class "colored" community where secrets and haircuts were prime commodities and the major social event was the annual mill...
Book cover for "Everything inside"
Star rating for Everything inside
Description:
From the best-selling author of Claire of the Sea Light and Brother, I'm Dying, a long-awaited return to fiction: a gorgeous collection of stories about community, family and love; about the forces that pull us together or drive us apart--a book rich with vividly imagined characters, hard-won wisdom, and humanity. In these eight stories by widely acclaimed, prizewinning author Danticat--some of which have appeared The New Yorker--a romance unexpectedly...
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 "Go tell it on the mountain"
Star rating for Go tell it on the mountain
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
The story of a teenager's conversion to religion and of the history of a black American family. A reissue. James Baldwin's stunning first novel is now an American classic. With startling realism that brings Harlem and the black experience vividly to life, this is a work that touches the heart with emotion while it stimulates the mind with its narrative style, symbolism, and excoriating vision of racism in America. Moving through time from the rural...
Book cover for "Hair love"
Star rating for Hair love
Average Rating:
4 stars
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."--
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 "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 "Long way down"
Star rating for Long way down
Description:
"An intense snapshot of the chain reaction caused by pulling a trigger." — Booklist (starred review) "Astonishing." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "A tour de force." — Publishers Weekly (starred review) A Newbery Honor Book A Coretta Scott King Honor Book A Printz Honor Book A Time Best YA Book of All Time (2021) A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner for Young Adult Literature Longlisted for the National...