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"Winner of the Pulitzer Prize...
A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown,...
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Series
Virago modern classic volume no. 199
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An African-American woman searches for a fulfilling relationship through two loveless marriages and finally finds it in the person of Tea Cake, an itinerant laborer and gambler.
3) Passing
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Nella Larsen was an important writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance. While she was not prolific her work was powerful and critically acclaimed. Passing confronts the reality of racial passing. The novel focuses on two childhood friends Clare and Irene, both of whom are light skinned enough to pass as white, who have reconnected with one another after many years apart. Clare has chosen to pass while Irene has embraced her racial heritage and...
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Black History Month 2023
Book Chat May 20: World Bee Day
Book Chat: February 1: Brownie Camera Day
Fiction Book Discussion Titles
Book Chat May 20: World Bee Day
Book Chat: February 1: Brownie Camera Day
Fiction Book Discussion Titles
Description
Set in South Carolina in 1964, [this book] tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the town's fiercest racists, Lily decides they should both escape to Tiburon, South Carolina--a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. There they are taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters...
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Based on little-known true events, this astonishing account from Emmy and Peabody Award-winning journalist Jack Ford vividly recreates a treacherous journey toward freedom, a time when the traditions of the Old South still thrived-and is a testament to determination, friendship, and courage . . .
Two decades before the Civil War, a middle-class farmer named Samuel Maddox lies on his deathbed. Elsewhere in his Virginia home, a young woman named Kitty...
6) In the fall
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Book Chat March 11: Drive
Book Chat: January 18: Bootleggers, Scotch and Whiskey
VT Authors: Fiction-Adult
Book Chat: January 18: Bootleggers, Scotch and Whiskey
VT Authors: Fiction-Adult
Description
An interracial relationship between a Union soldier from Vermont and a runaway slave at the end of the Civil War initiates a haunting family legacy of war, racism, and secrets that follows three generations from the end of the Civil War to the Great Depression.
7) The help
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"With more than 3 million copies sold, the #1 New York Times bestseller is now available in a special gift edition. A modern classic, The Help has been a cultural touchstone for the millions of readers who have cheered on Skeeter, laughed with Minny, and hissed at Hilly. The noble and strong Aibileen has become a heroine for countless fans whose letters have poured in from all over the world. Now the bestselling and beloved book is available in a...
8) Beloved
Author
Series
Everyman's library volume 268
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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...
Author
Description
"Meet Odette, Clarice, and Barbara Jean ... Earl's All-You-Can-Eat is home away from home for this inseparable Plainview, Indiana, trio. Dubbed "the Supremes" by high school pals in the tumultuous 1960s, they weather life's storms together for the next four decades. Now, during their most challenging year yet, dutiful, proud, and talented Clarice must struggle to keep up appearances as she deals with her husband's humiliating infidelities. Beautiful,...
Author
Description
"The Blacker the Berry" is the provocative and illuminating 1929 novel by Harlem Renaissance author Wallace Thurman. The novel follows the life of Emma Lou Morgan, a young black woman with dark skin. She is born and raised by her single mother in the predominantly white community of Boise, Idaho. She often feels like an outsider, even among her family, as they are lighter skinned than she, and believes that her dark skin will keep her from marrying...
12) Getting to happy
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2010
Description
A sequel to "Waiting to Exhale" picks up fifteen years later to find Savannah contemplating divorce, Bernadine succumbing to painkiller addiction after a second husband's swindle, Robin falling into shopaholism, and Gloria confronting profound change after a fateful event.
Author
Description
"Los Angeles, 1928. An up-and-coming journalist, Daisy Washington anonymously chronicles fierce activism and behind-the-scenes Hollywood scandals to save her family from poverty. But power is also fueled by racism, greed, and betrayal. Chicago, 1968. For Frankie Saunders, fleeing across America is her only escape from an abusive husband. But her rescuer is her Aunt Daisy, still reeling from her own shattered past. Daisy will do whatever it takes to...
14) Kindred
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Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned across the years to save him. After this first summons, Dana is drawn back, again and again, to the plantation to protect Rufus and ensure that he will grow to manhood and father...
Author
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Black History Month
Black History Month 2023
Book Discussion Sets - Fiction
NPL Staff Favorites for 2022
Black History Month 2023
Book Discussion Sets - Fiction
NPL Staff Favorites for 2022
Description
"The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and...
Author
Description
Dr. Georgia Young's wonderful life--great friends, family, and successful career--aren't enough to keep her from feeling stuck and restless. When she decides to make some major changes in her life, quitting her job as an optometrist, and moving house, she finds herself on a wild journey that may or may not include a second chance at love.
Author
Description
In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them for...
18) Conception
Author
Description
In the same vein of Kalisha Buckhanon's critically-acclaimed debut novel Upstate, again she shares an emotionally beautiful story about today's youth that magnifies the unforgettable power of hope and the human spirit.
Buckhanon takes us to Chicago, 1992, and into the life of fifteen-year-old Shivana Montgomery, who believes all Black women wind up the same: single and raising children alone, like her mother. Until the sudden visit of her beautiful...
19) Feminista
Author
Description
Sydney Zamora is fiercely independent, aggressively opinionated, and utterly self-made. She's reshaped her body (into the perfect sample-sale outfitted size 6, thank you very much), organized a life for herself as a celebrity journalist at hot magazine Cachet, and strides through the canyons of New York City like she owns them. There's just one problem: Sydney is so strong that she plays keep-away with men. But, now that she's hitting her mid-thirties,...
Author
Description
In 1961, when Amazing Grace Jansen, a firecracker from Appalachia, meets Mary Elizabeth Cox, the daughter of a Black southern preacher, at Kentucky's Berea College, they already carry the scars and traces of their mothers' troubles. Poor and single, Maze's mother has had to raise her daughter alone and fight to keep a roof over their heads. Mary Elizabeth's mother has carried a shattering grief throughout her life, a loss so great that it has disabled...
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