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🧲 Books like this

Song of the Trees

Mildred D. Taylor · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

Sugar

Jewell Parker Rhodes · 272 pages

In 1870, Reconstruction brings big changes to the Louisiana sugar plantation where spunky ten-year-old Sugar has always lived, including her friendship with Billy, the son of her former master, and the arrival of workmen from China. In the 1870s, Reconstruction brings big changes to the Louisiana sugar plantation where spunky ten-year-old Sugar has always lived, including her growing friendship w

Child NarratorAmerican SouthRacismMiddle Grade
❤️

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.

Child NarratorAmerican SouthRacismMiddle Grade
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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.

Child NarratorAmerican SouthRacismMiddle Grade
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Nightjohn

Gary Paulsen · 92 pages

Summary: Twelve-year-old Sarny's brutal life as a slave becomes even more dangerous when a newly arrived slave offers to teach her how to read.

Child NarratorAmerican SouthRacismMiddle Grade
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One Crazy Summer

Rita Williams-Garcia · 232 pages

Eleven-year-old Delphine has it together. Even though her mother, Cecile, abandoned her and her younger sisters, Vonetta and Fern, seven years ago. Even though her father and Big Ma will send them from Brooklyn to Oakland, California, to stay with Cecile for the summer. And even though Delphine will have to take care of her sisters, as usual, and learn the truth about the missing pieces of the pas

Child NarratorRacismMiddle GradeHistorical Fiction
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Ruby Lee and Me

Shannon Hitchcock · 224 pages

Child NarratorAmerican SouthRacismMiddle Grade
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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

Child NarratorRacismMiddle GradeHistorical Fiction
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The Darkest Child

Delores Phillips · 392 pages

Pakersfield, Georgia, 1958: Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn is the sixth of ten fatherless siblings. She is the darkest-skinned among them and therefore the ugliest in her mother, Rozelle’s, estimation, but she’s also the brightest. Rozelle—beautiful, charismatic, and light-skinned—exercises a violent hold over her children. Fearing abandonment, she pulls them from school at the age of twelve an

Child NarratorRacismAmerican SouthHistorical Fiction
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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.

Child NarratorRacismAmerican SouthMiddle Grade
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In Front of God and Everybody

K.D. McCrite · 301 pages

In the summer of 1986, eleven-year-old April Grace, who lives on a rural Arkansas farm with her family, across a field from her grandmother, has her sense of Christian charity tested when a snooty couple from San Francisco moves into a dilapidated house down the road and her grandmother takes up with a loud, obnoxious, and suspicious-acting Texan.

Child NarratorAmerican SouthMiddle GradeFirst Person Narrator
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Child NarratorAmerican SouthRacismHistorical Fiction
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Serafina and the Twisted Staff

Robert Beatty · 370 pages

In 1899, when an evil threatens all the humans and animals of the Blue Ridge Mountains, twelve-year-old Serafina, rat catcher for the Biltmore estate and the daughter of a shapeshifting mountain lion, must search deep inside herself and embrace the destiny that awaits her.

ForestAmerican SouthMiddle GradeHistorical Fiction
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With the Might of Angels: The Diary of Dawnie Rae Johnson, Hadley, Virginia, 1954

Andrea Davis Pinkney

Coretta Scott King winner Andrea Davis Pinkney brings her talents to a brand-new Dear America diary about the Civil Rights Movement. In the fall of 1955, twelve-year-old Dawn Rae Johnson's life turns upside down. After the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, Dawnie learns she will be attending a previously all-white school. She's the only one of her friends to go to this new sc

Child NarratorRacismMiddle GradeHistorical Fiction
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The Secret of Nightingale Wood

Lucy Strange · 304 pages

1919. Mama is ill. Father has taken a job abroad. Nanny Jane is too busy to pay any attention to Henrietta and the things she sees - or thinks she sees - in the shadows of their new home, Hope House. All alone, with only stories for company, Henry discovers that Hope House is full of strange secrets: a forgotten attic, ghostly figures, mysterious firelight that flickers in the trees beyond the gar

ForestChild NarratorMiddle GradeHistorical Fiction
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Sarah, Plain and Tall

Patricia MacLachlan · 64 pages

This Newbery Medal winning book and children's literature classic is perfect for fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie books, historical fiction, and timeless stories using rich and beautiful language. Sarah, Plain and Tall gently explores themes of abandonment, loss and love. The 30th Anniversary edition includes author Patricia MacLachlan s Newbery speech, discussion guide a

Child NarratorMiddle GradeNovellaHistorical Fiction
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain · 330 pages

Child NarratorRacismAmerican SouthHistorical Fiction
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Little Audrey

Ruth White · 145 pages

In 1948, eleven-year-old Audrey lives with her father, mother, and three younger sisters in Jewell Valley, a coal mining camp in Southwest Virginia, where her mother still mourns the death of a baby, her father goes on drinking binges on paydays, and Audrey tries to recover from the scarlet fever that has left her skinny and needing to wear glasses.

Child NarratorMiddle GradeAmerican SouthHistorical Fiction
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Zora and Me

Victoria Bond, T.R. Simon

A fictionalized account of Zora Neale Hurston's childhood with her best friend Carrie, in Eatonville, Florida, as they learn about life, death, and the differences between truth, lies, and pretending. Includes an annotated bibliography of the works of Zora Neale Hurston, a short biography of the author, and information about Eatonville, Florida.

RacismAmerican SouthMiddle GradeHistorical Fiction
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Leaving Gee's Bend

Irene Latham · 192 pages

Ludelphia Bennett may be blind in one eye, but she can still put in a good stitch. Ludelphia sews all the time, especially when things go wrong.But when Mama goes into labor early and gets deathly ill, it seems like even quilting won't help. That's when Ludelphia decides to do something drastic-leave Gee's Bend for the very first time. Mama needs medicine that can only be found miles away in Camde

Child NarratorAmerican SouthMiddle GradeHistorical Fiction
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A Painted House

John Grisham · 465 pages

Using his own childhood for inspiration (and leaving the lawyers behind), bestselling author John Grisham sets A Painted House in 1950s rural Arkansas. During harvest time, together with hired Mexicans and hill people, seven-year-old Luke Chandler picks cotton on his family's rented 80 acres. But racial tension, a forbidden love affair, and murder cause Luke to grow up before he's ready.

Child NarratorAmerican SouthRacismHistorical Fiction
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Yankee Girl

Mary Ann Rodman · 229 pages

When her FBI-agent father is transferred to Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964, eleven-year-old Alice wants to be popular but also wants to reach out to the one black girl in her class in a newly-integrated school.

RacismAmerican SouthMiddle GradeHistorical Fiction
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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

American SouthRacismMiddle GradeHistorical Fiction
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The Lions of Little Rock

Kristin Levine

In 1958 Little Rock, Arkansas, painfully shy twelve-year-old Marlee sees her city and family divided over school integration, but her friendship with Liz, a new student, helps her find her voice and fight against racism.

American SouthRacismMiddle GradeHistorical Fiction
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Necessary Lies

Diane Chamberlain · 370 pages

Caring for her family on their mid-20th-century tobacco farm after the loss of her parents, 15-year-old Ivy connects with Grace County social worker Jane, who strains her personal and professional relationships with her advocacy of Ivy's family, whose dark secrets test Jane's resolve against racial tensions and state-mandated sterilizations.

American SouthRacismHistorical FictionFirst Person Narrator

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