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The Firefly Letters

Margarita Engle · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys · 189 pages

Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of citsion's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre". A sensual and protected young woman, the narrator grows up in the lush, natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold into marriage to the cold-hearted and prideful R

CaribbeanSlavery DepictedFeminismLyrical Prose
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Pirates!

Celia Rees · 381 pages

In 1722, after arriving with her brother at the family's Jamaican plantation where she is to be married off, sixteen-year-old Nancy Kington escapes with her slave friend, Minerva Sharpe, and together they become pirates traveling the world in search of treasure.

CaribbeanSlavery DepictedFeminismHistorical Fiction
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Sold

Patricia McCormick · 272 pages

Lakshmi is a thirteen-year-old girl who lives with her family in a small hut in the mountains of Nepal. Her family is desperately poor, but her life is full of simple pleasures, like raising her black-and-white speckled goat, and having her mother brush her hair by the light of an oil lamp. But when the harsh Himalayan monsoons wash away all that remains of the family’s crops, Lakshmi’s stepfather

Verse NovelSlavery DepictedLyrical ProseYoung Adult
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I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

Maryse Conde · 227 pages

Offered here for the first time in English is I, Tituba Black Witch of Salem, by Guadeloupean writer Maryse Conde. This wild and entertaining novel, winner of the 1986 Grand Prix Litteraire de la Femme, expands on the true story of the West Indian slave Tituba, who was accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, arrested in 1692, and forgotten in jail until the general amnesty for witches two y

CaribbeanSlavery DepictedFeminismHistorical Fiction
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Your Own, Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath

Stephanie Hemphill · 276 pages

On a bleak February day in 1963 a young American poet died by her own hand, and passed into a myth that has since imprinted itself on the hearts and minds of millions. She was and is Sylvia Plath and Your Own, Sylvia is a portrait of her life, told in poems.With photos and an extensive list of facts and sources to round out the reading experience, Your Own, Sylvia is a great curriculum companion t

Verse NovelFeminismMultiple POVYoung Adult
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Three Rivers Rising: A Novel of the Johnstown Flood

Jame Richards · 304 pages

Sixteen-Year-Old Celstia spends every summer with her family at the elite resort at Lake Conemaugh, a shimmering Allegheny Mountain reservoir held in place by an earthen dam. Tired of the society crowd, Celestia prefers to swim and fish with Peter, the hotel's hired boy. It's a friendship she must keep secret, and when companionship turns to romance, it's a love that could get Celestia disowned. T

Verse NovelLyrical ProseMultiple POVHistorical Fiction
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The Invention of Wings

Sue Monk Kidd · 384 pages

Hetty "Handful" Grimké, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimké household. The Grimké's daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women. On Sarah's eleventh birthday, she is given ownership of ten ye

Slavery DepictedFeminismLyrical ProseMultiple POV
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The Book of Night Women

Marlon James · 432 pages

From a young writer who radiates charisma and talent comes a sweeping, stylish historical novel of Jamaican slavery that can be compared only to Toni Morrison's Beloved.The Book of Night Women is a sweeping, startling novel—a true tour de force of both voice and storytelling—that tells the story of a young slave woman on a sugar plantation in Jamaica at the turn of the nineteenth century, revealin

CaribbeanSlavery DepictedLyrical ProseHistorical Fiction
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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

Verse NovelSlavery DepictedHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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Cambridge

Caryl Phillips · 187 pages

Dramatic and challenging novel about freedom and prejudice by one of the most important authors of his generationCambridge is a powerful and haunting novel set in that uneasy time between the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of the slaves. It is the story of Emily Cambridge, a young woman sent from England to visit her father's West Indian plantation, and Cambridge, a plantation s

CaribbeanSlavery DepictedHistorical FictionMultiple POV
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The Salt Roads

Nalo Hopkinson · 405 pages

Slavery DepictedCaribbeanMultiple POVHistorical Fiction
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The Fraud

Zadie Smith · 520 pages

Truth and justice tested by a 19th-century author and his cousin, and a fraudulent pretender and his manumitted witness.

CaribbeanSlavery DepictedMultiple POVHistorical Fiction
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Paper Hearts

Meg Wiviott · 352 pages

"Amid the brutality of Auschwitz during the Holocaust, a forbidden gift helps two teenage girls find hope, friendship, and the will to live in this novel in verse that?s based on a true story."--Amazon.com.

Verse NovelMultiple POVHistorical FictionYoung Adult
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Black Heart of Jamaica

Julia Golding · 376 pages

Notice to the public of Jamaica due to the threat of a rebellion by the slaves of this island, be it therefore enacted that from this day, 1st July 1792, All persons report any suspicions of revolutionary plots immidiately!

CaribbeanSlavery DepictedHistorical FictionYoung Adult
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Aleutian Sparrow

Karen Hesse · 156 pages

An Aleutian Islander recounts her suffering during World War II in American internment camps designed to "protect" the population from the invading Japanese.

Verse NovelLyrical ProseHistorical FictionYoung Adult
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Aurora Leigh

Elizabeth Barrett Browning · 403 pages

Aurora Leigh is the foremost example of the mid-nineteenth-century poem of contemporary life. This verse-novel is a richly detailed representation of the early Victorian age. The social panorama extends from the slums of London, through the literary world, to the upper classes and a number of superb satiric portraits: an aunt with rigidly conventional notions of female education; Romney Leigh, th

Verse NovelFeminismLyrical ProseFemale Lead
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All Souls' Rising

Madison Smartt Bell · 530 pages

One of the most prolific and gifted writers at work today presents an epic novel of astonishing depth and range about the black uprising in Haiti 200 years ago. A remarkable retelling of an episode of racial hatred at its most visceral and most unimaginably destructive, All Souls' Rising is Bell's most ambitious, most deeply satisfying novel to date.From the Hardcover edition.

CaribbeanSlavery DepictedHistorical FictionMultiple POV
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The Kingdom of This World

Alejo Carpentier · 150 pages

CaribbeanSlavery DepictedLyrical ProseHistorical Fiction
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The Polished Hoe

Austin Clarke · 480 pages

CaribbeanSlavery DepictedLyrical ProseHistorical Fiction
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Island Beneath the Sea

Isabel Allende · 457 pages

Though her childhood of slavery on Saint-Domingue is one of brutality and fear, Tt? finds solace in the traditional rhythms of African drums and in the voodoo loas she discovers through her fellow slaves. When twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770 to run his father's plantation, he purchases young Tt? as his bride and becomes dependent on the services of his teenaged sla

CaribbeanSlavery DepictedHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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Of Noble Family

Mary Robinette Kowal · 575 pages

Jane and Vincent have finally gotten some much-needed rest after their adventures in Italy when Vincent receives word that his estranged father has passed away on one of his properties in the West Indies. His brother, who manages the estate, is overwhelmed, and no one else in his family can help. Grudgingly, out of filial duty the couple decides to go. The sea voyage is long, and Jane spends en

CaribbeanSlavery DepictedHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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Two Girls Staring at the Ceiling

Lucy Frank · 272 pages

This novel-in-verse—at once literary and emotionally gripping—follows the unfolding friendship between two very different teenage girls who share a hospital room and an illness. Chess, the narrator, is sick, but with what exactly, she isn’t sure. And to make matters worse, she must share a hospital room with Shannon, her polar opposite. Where Chess is polite, Shannon is rude. Where Chess tolera

Verse NovelLyrical ProseFemale LeadYoung Adult
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5 to 1

Holly Bodger · 257 pages

Verse NovelFeminismMultiple POVYoung Adult
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Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl

Kate McCafferty · 224 pages

"This is the story of Cot Daley, a young girl kidnapped from her home in Galway, Ireland, and shipped out to Barbados, where more than fifty thousand Irish sold as indentured servants to the plantation owners of the Caribbean worked the land alongside African slaves. Most of them would never see their families again."--BOOK JACKET.

CaribbeanSlavery DepictedHistorical FictionFemale Lead

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