Lynne Thigpen
1) Jazz
Author
Language
English
Description
In Harlem, 1926, Joe Trace, a door-to-door salemsan in his fifties, kills his teenage lover. At the funeral, his wife Violet slashes the dead girl's face and then desperately searches to find why Joe was unfaithful. The profound love story is immersed in the sights and sounds of Black urban life during the Jazz Age.
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"Tells the story of black, eleven-year old Pecola Breedlove. She prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blonde, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves' garden do not bloom, Pecola's life changes in painful, devastating ways." --
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"Heralded for its powerful depiction of life in the American South during the Great Depression, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry won the 1977 Newberry Medal and went on to become a pillar of American children's literature. Its message of individual dignity and regard for humanity has made it a touchstone for readers of all ages. This anniversary edition celebrates the Logans' enduring legacy and brings their timeless story to a new generation." --
4) Tar baby
Author
Language
English
Description
A ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary reinvention of the love story by the legendary Nobel Prize winner
Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts...
Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts...
Author
Language
English
Description
“Grand, robust, a rich and big novel.”—Alice Walker, The New York Times Book Review
“In [Jane Pittman], Ernest Gaines has created a legendary figure. . . . Gaines’s novel brings to mind other great works: The Odyssey, for the way his heroine’s travels manage to summarize the American history of her race, and Huckleberry Finn, for the clarity of [Pittman’s] voice,...
“In [Jane Pittman], Ernest Gaines has created a legendary figure. . . . Gaines’s novel brings to mind other great works: The Odyssey, for the way his heroine’s travels manage to summarize the American history of her race, and Huckleberry Finn, for the clarity of [Pittman’s] voice,...
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"In 2025 California, an eighteen-year-old African American woman, suffering from a hereditary trait that causes her to feel others' pain as well as her own, flees northward from her small community and its desperate savages." --
"When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another...
8) Sarny
Author
Publisher
Random House Children's Books
Pub. Date
2011
Language
English
Formats
Description
Many readers of Nightjohn have wanted to know what happened to Sarny, the young slave whom Nightjohn taught to read. Here is Sarny's story, from the moment she leaves the plantation in the last days of the Civil War, suddenly a free woman in search of her sold-away children. Her search takes her to New Orleans and the home of the mysterious and remarkable Miss Laura. Like Nightjohn, Miss Laura changes Sarny's life, and she helps Sarny pass...
9) Zeely
Author
Publisher
Macmillan
Pub. Date
[1967]
Language
English
Description
Greeder's summer at her uncle's farm is made special because of her friendship with a very tall, composed woman who raises hogs and who closely resembles the magazine photograph of a Watutsi queen.
10) Novocaine
Publisher
Artisan Home Entertainment
Pub. Date
[2002]
Language
English
Description
A prosperous dentist has his well-ordered existence thrown into turmoil when an alluring new patient draws him into the seedy underworld of sex, drugs and murder.
11) Lean on me
Publisher
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc
Pub. Date
[2010]
Language
English
Description
Based on the true story of New Jersey high school principal Joe Clark, who wins the support and respect of his students for his controversial methods in ridding the school of violent students and drug dealers.
13) Steal away
Author
Publisher
Orchard Books
Pub. Date
[1992]
Language
English
Description
In 1855 two thirteen-year-old girls, one white and one black, run away from a southern farm and make the difficult journey north to freedom, living to recount their story forty-one years later to two similar young girls.