Witness

Let the Circle Be Unbroken

Mildred D. Taylor · 394 pages

Let the Circle Be Unbroken is a story of a small Mississippi town in the 1930s, and the troubles that plague its black community. Picking up where its precursor, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, leaves off, Mildred Taylor recounts the trials of this small community through the characters of the Logan family. More specifically, it focuses on the children of the family; Stacey, Cassie, Little Man and C

To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee · 309 pages

One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than 40 languages, sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and voted one of the best novels of the 20th century by librarians across the United States. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poi

Brown Girl Dreaming

Jacqueline Woodson · 368 pages

Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

Fannie Flagg · 403 pages

Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is a now-classic novel about two women: Evelyn, who’s in the sad slump of middle age, and gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode, who’s telling her life story. Her tale includes two more women—the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth—who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Ala

Yellow Star

Jennifer Roy · 227 pages

From 1939, when Syvia is four and a half years old, to 1945 when she has just turned ten, a Jewish girl and her family struggle to survive in Poland's Lodz ghetto during the Nazi occupation.

The Help

Kathryn Stockett · 464 pages

Be prepared to meet three unforgettable women: Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers · 334 pages

Set in 1930s Georgia, the novel centers around a deaf and mute man, John Singer. Singer has been devastated by the loss of his dear friend, Antonapoulos, who was committed to an asylum for bad behavior

Snow Falling on Cedars

David Guterson · 424 pages

On San Piedro, an island of rugged, spectacular beauty in Puget Sound, home to salmon fishermen and strawberry farmers, a Japanese-American fisherman stands trial, charged with murder. The year is 1954, and the shadow of World War II, with its brutality abroad and internment of Japanese Americans at home, hangs over the courtroom. Ishmael Cambers, who lost an arm in the Pacific war and now runs th

The Crazy Man

Pamela Porter · 176 pages

Twelve-year-old Emaline Bitterman loves her home on the prairies. She loves helping her father in the fields and her dog, Prince. But farming in southern Saskatchewan in the mid 1960s is not easy. And then one day Emaline tries to stop Prince from chasing a hare into the path of the tractor her father is driving, and her leg is caught in the discer, leaving her with a permanent disability. In his

The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963

Christopher Paul Curtis · 239 pages

The ordinary interactions and everyday routines of the Watsons, an African American family living in Flint, Michigan, are drastically changed after they go to visit Grandma in Alabama in the summer of 1963.

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

James McBride · 614 pages

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighbourhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared amb

Whistling Past the Graveyard

Susan Crandall · 320 pages

Determined to get to Nashville to find her mother in 1963, nine-year-old spitfire Starla Claudelle runs away from her strict grandmother's Mississippi home, eventually accepting a ride from a Eula, a black woman traveling alone with a white baby. In 1963, determined to get to Nashville to find her mother, nine-year-old spitfire Starla runs away from her strict grandmother's Mississippi home. The

Color Me Dark: The Diary of Nellie Lee Love, the Great Migration North

Patricia C. McKissack · 220 pages

An ordinary girl living extraordinary events. Her family, Love, characterizes her comfortable, secure world in Bradford Corners, TN. Until Uncle Pace is murdered by the KKK. The Author gradually exposes the prejudice & segregation existing even though slavery has been abolished over 50 years. All discover, how whites live on one side of the only road, & Colored live on the other. We recognize t

Dreamland Burning

Jennifer Latham · 377 pages

SOME BODIES WON'T STAY BURIED. SOME STORIES NEED TO BE TOLD. When seventeen-year-old Rowan Chase finds a skeleton on her family's property, she has no idea that investigating the brutal century-old murder will lead to a summer of painful discoveries about the past, the present, and herself. One hundred years earlier, a single violent encounter propels seventeen-year-old Will Tillman into

A Calamity of Souls

David Baldacci

A Thousand Never Evers

Shana Burg · 310 pages

IN KUCKACHOO, MISSISSIPPI, 1963, Addie Ann Pickett worships her brother Elias and follows in his footsteps by attending the black junior high school. But when her careless act leads to her brother's disappearance and possible murder, Addie Ann, Mama, and Uncle Bump struggle with not knowing if he's dead or alive. Then a good deed meant to unite Kuckachoo sets off a chain of explosive events. Addie

Lies We Tell Ourselves

Robin Talley · 376 pages

In 1959 Virginia, Sarah, a black student who is one of the first to attend a newly integrated school, forces Linda, a white integration opponent's daughter, to confront harsh truths when they work together on a school project.

The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison · 181 pages

Each night Pecola prayed for blue eyes. In her eleven years, no one had ever noticed Pecola. But with blue eyes, she thought, everything would be different. She would be so pretty that her parents would stop fighting. Her father would stop drinking. Her brother would stop running away. If only she could be beautiful. If only people would look at her. When someone finally did, it was her fath

Inside Out & Back Again

Thanhha Lai · 274 pages

Inside Out & Back Again is a verse novel by Thanhha Lai. The book was awarded the 2011 National Book Award for Young People's Literature and one of the two Newbery Honors. The novel was based on her first year in the United States, as a ten-year-old girl who spoke no English in 1975.

Glory Be

Augusta Scattergood · 205 pages

In the summer of 1964 as she is about to turn twelve, Glory's town of Hanging Moss, Mississippi, is beset by racial tension when town leaders close her beloved public pool rather than desegregating it.

Hidden

Helen Frost · 147 pages

When fourteen-year-olds Wren and Darra meet at a Michigan summer camp, both are overwhelmed by memories from six years earlier when Darra's father stole a car, unaware that Wren was hiding in the back. Years after Darra Monson's father stole a minivan with Wren Abbott hiding in the back, the girls come face to face at summer camp, and together they try to work through what happened to them and th

Red Butterfly

A.L. Sonnichsen · 400 pages

A young orphaned girl in modern-day China discovers the meaning of family in this inspiring story told in verse, in the tradition of Inside Out and Back Again and Sold. Kara never met her birth mother. Abandoned as an infant, she was taken in by an American woman living in China. Now eleven, Kara spends most of her time in their apartment, wondering why she and Mama cannot leave the city of Tianji

The House Girl

Tara Conklin · 372 pages

A novel of love, family, and justice follows Lina Sparrow, an ambitious first-year associate in a Manhattan law firm, as she searches for the "perfect plaintiff" to lead a historic class-action lawsuit worth trillions of dollars in reparations for descendants of American slaves.

Unbound: A Novel in Verse

Ann E. Burg · 345 pages

The day nine-year-old Grace is called to work in the kitchen in the Big House, everyone warns her to to keep her head down and her thoughts to herself, but the more she sees of the oppressive Master and his hateful wife, the more she questions things until one day her thoughts escape--and to avoid being separated she and her family flee into the Dismal Swamp, to join the other escaped slaves who l