"At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished Haitian village to New York to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti--to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence. In her stunning literary...
A nurse escapes her abusive husband, a New York policeman, taking their son with her to Florida. She assumes a new identity and even finds romance, but there is a price, the 10-year-old boy misses his father and she lives in constant fear the father will find them, which he does. The novel analyzes why abused women wait so long to make their break.
A middle-aged woman, along with her fifteen-year-old daughter, returns to her small Massachusetts hometown for the funeral of the housekeeper who raised her and finds herself thrust into the lives of the people she left behind.
Blinking Jack Stokes was a skinny tenant farmer, and Ruby Pitt Woodrow was "the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry ... They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life."--Pbk. cover.
Having suffered abuse and misfortune for much of her life, a young child searches for a better life and finally gets a break in the home of a loving woman with several foster children.
From the author of, A Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman comes a deep and compassionate novel. Grant Wiggins, a college-educated man returns to 1940s Cajun, he visits and forms an unlikely bond with Jefferson, a young Black man convicted of murder and sentenced to death, for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting. Best Books for Young Teen Readers. In the 1940s in rural Louisiana,...
This fourth autobiographical work by Maya Angelou tells of her entry into New York's circle of African-American artists and writers, her involvement in the civil rights movement, and changes in her personal life.
"It's the summer of 1960 in Atkinson, Vermont. Marie Fermoyle is a strong but vulnerable divorced woman whose loneliness and ambition for her children make her easy prey for dangerous con man Omar Duvall. Marie's children are Alice, seventeen-involved with a young priest; Norm, sixteen-hotheaded and idealistic; and Benjy, twelve-isolated and misunderstood, and so desperate for his mother's happiness that he hides the deadly truth he knows about Duvall....
Novelist Sheri Reynolds weaves lyrical prose and folksy dialogue into her spellbinding tales. The Rapture of Canaan, a New York Times best-seller, is the moving story of a teenaged girl clashing with her harshly controlled world. Growing up in a closed religious community deep in the rural South, 15-year-old Ninah Huff painstakingly and obediently follows her church's many rules-she knows that public humiliation follows the smallest transgression....
From the acclaimed author of Floating in My Mother's Palm and Children and Fire, a stunning story about ordinary people living in extraordinary times—"epic, daring, magnificent, the product of a defining and mesmerizing vision" (Los Angeles Times). Trudi Montag is a Zwerg—a dwarf—short, undesirable, different, the voice of anyone who has ever tried to fit in. Eventually she learns that being...
A series of tragedies, including the death of her baby brother, her parent's divorce, her mother's nervous breakdown, and her own rape at the age of thirteen, leaves Dolores Price wounded both mentally and physically, but she miraculously finds the strength to give herself one more chance at life and love.
Ruth tries to hold her own in a small town where she can't escape poverty and hard knocks. When the household erupts in violence, Ruth is the only one who can piece the story together.
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers...
"Watch your brother," Beth Cappadora tells Vincent, 7. Five minutes later she returns, "Where is Ben?" It is the moment every parent fears and it arrives to a mother of three in Chicago. The novel follows the family as year after year the hope of finding Ben recedes. Nine years later a boy knocks on their door looking for lawn work. It can't be. It is.