Leaving Atlanta

Leaving Atlanta
Tayari Jones
ISBN 0446559652

"It was the end of summer, a summer during a two-year nightmare. African American children around Atlanta were vanishing, and twenty-nine would be murdered by the end of 1981. Like all kids across the city, fifth-grade classmates Tasha Baxter, Rodney Green, and Octavia Harrison were discovering that back-to-school now meant special safety lessons, indoor recess, and being thrown into a world their parents couldn't comprehend, one in which the everyday challenges of growing up were coupled with constant fear - and the news of the murders of one's peers." Tasha can't understand why she daily falls in and out of favor with her classmates - she isn't weird like Rodney or "too dark" and outspoken like Octavia. Then, through a sudden crush on a boy from the wrong side of town, she finds that words have the power to both heal and wound. (The next thought was that Tasha herself had brought it upon him with her hateful words. "I hope the man snatches you." And she meant it when she said it.).

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
Heidi W. Durrow
ISBN 1565126807

This debut novel tells the story of Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I. who becomes the sole survivor of a family tragedy. With her strict African American grandmother as her new guardian, Rachel moves to a mostly black community, where her light brown skin, blue eyes, and beauty bring mixed attention her way. Growing up in the 1980s, she learns to swallow her overwhelming grief and confronts her identity as a biracial young woman in a world that wants to see her as either black or white. In the tradition of Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, here is a portrait of a young girl - and society's ideas of race, class, and beauty.

Good Fortune

Good Fortune
Noni Carter
ISBN 1416984801

Brutally kidnapped from her African village and shipped to America, Ayanna Bahati struggles to come to terms with her new life as a slave. Rising from the cotton fields to her master's house, Anna is threatened by the increasingly dangerous world of the plantation. Risking everything, she escapes and makes her way north to freedom and an education, but can she shed the chains of her harrowing past to live the life she has longed for?

A stirring debut novel from a young talent, Good Fortune traces one girl's journey from slavery to liberation -- and how she finds her true self along the way.

My Life as a Rhombus

My Life as a Rhombus
Varian Johnson
ISBN 0738711608


Boys + Love = Trouble Right?

Staying on track at school means a boy-free equation for Rhonda Lee, who spends most evenings doing homework and eating Chinese takeout with her dad. While Rhonda needs a scholarship for college, some kids at her private high school, like beautiful Sarah Gamble, seem to coast along on popularity and their parents' money.

When forced to tutor Sarah in trigonometry, Rhonda recognizes all too well the symptoms-queasiness, puking, exhaustion-that Sarah is trying to mask. On a sudden impulse, Rhonda shares her past with Sarah. Exchanging their secrets adds up to more truths than either girl would have dreamed.

"Without a bit of preaching, [this is] a story of two teenage girls who are faced with the consequences of unplanned pregnancies. [Readers] will love the emotional peaks and valleys of the tale." -Ellen Wittlinger, author of Hard Love

"A sensitive and powerful friendship story. Realistic and heartfelt." -Cynthia Leitich Smith, author of Tantalize

A la Carte

A la Carte
Tanita S. Davis
ISBN 0375848150

SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD LAINEY DREAMS of becoming a world famous chef one day and maybe even having her own cooking show. (Do you know how many African American female chefs there aren’t? And how many vegetarian chefs have their own shows? The field is wide open for stardom!) But when her best friend—and secret crush—suddenly leaves town, Lainey finds herself alone in the kitchen. With a little help from Saint Julia (Child, of course), Lainey finds solace in her cooking as she comes to terms with the past and begins a new recipe for the future.
Peppered with recipes from Lainey’s notebooks, this delicious debut novel finishes the same way one feels finishing a good meal—satiated, content, and hopeful

All Aunt Hagar's Children

All Aunt Hagar's Children
Edward P. Jones
ISBN 0060557567

In fourteen sweeping and sublime stories, five of which have been published in The New Yorker, the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Known World shows that his grasp of the human condition is firmer than ever.

Returning to the city that inspired his first prizewinning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city's power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens. All Aunt Hagar's Children turns an unflinching eye to the men, women, and children caught between the old ways of the South and the temptations that await them further north, people who in Jones's masterful hands, emerge as fully human and morally complex, whether they are country folk used to getting up with the chickens or people with centuries of education behind them.
In the title story, in which Jones employs the first-person rhythms of a classic detective story, a Korean War veteran investigates the death of a family friend whose sorry destiny seems inextricable from his mother's own violent Southern childhood. In "In the Blink of God's Eye" and "Tapestry" newly married couples leave behind the familiarity of rural life to pursue lives of urban promise only to be challenged and disappointed.
With the legacy of slavery just a stone's throw away and the future uncertain, Jones's cornucopia of characters will haunt readers for years to come.

Fifth Born: A Novel

Fifth Born: A Novel
Zelda Lockhart
ISBN 0743412664

Debut novelist Zelda Lockhart studied with writer Dorothy Allison, and the evidence of that link lies on every page. Like much of Allison's work,Fifth Born is a painful read. In a voice with the same immediacy as that of Allison's protagonist, Bone, in Bastard Out of Carolina, Lockhart's endearing Odessa, the "fifth born" child in an ever-expanding family, is the keen-eyed observer who takes readers on a harrowing journey through adolescence.

Odessa's unruly Mississippi family moves north to St. Louis, but their problems follow close behind. Her "Deddy," an alcoholic with "a dullness behind his eyes from so much wanting and not enough getting," wields his belt as a weapon, and the threat of its usage is omnipresent. But the belt is just one symbol of the power he holds. Odessa's mama, a prototypical enabler, makes up stories to mask the family abuse rather than risk confrontation, convincing a young Odessa of her inability to see things clearly.

Odessa's story, unfortunately, is not a new one. But Lockhart's literary sensibilities, so well honed for a newcomer, raise the bar for the typical abuse tale. The raw intensity of her prose sings with tension and stuns with its ability to affect. But Fifth Born does not end without hope. Odessa goes in search of the truth and begins to see more clearly than ever the terrible darkness the cloak of secrecy has compelled her family to live within, and to realize that she, though wounded, may find someone to love her after all.
(Fall 2002 Selection)

The Darkest Child: A Novel

The Darkest Child: A Novel
Delores Phillips
ISBN 1569473781

Phillips's searing debut reveals the poverty, injustices and cruelties that one black family suffers—some of this at the hands of its matriarch—in a 1958 backwater Georgia town. Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn loves her mother, Rozelle, but knows there's "something wrong" with her—which, as it soon becomes clear, is an extreme understatement. As the novel opens, Rozelle is getting ready to give birth to her 10th child (by a 10th father) and thinking about forcing the obedient Tangy Mae, who longs to stay in school, to take over her housecleaning job. Using a large cast of powerfully drawn characters, Phillips captures life in a town that serves as a microcosm of a world on the brink of change. There's Junior, the perpetual optimist, who wants to teach people to read and write so they can understand the injustices of Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan; Hambone, a here today/gone tomorrow rabble-rouser whose anger against white men and their laws inflames those around him; and Miss Pearl, the only true friend to the Quinn family. At the dark heart of the story is Rozelle, the beautiful mixed-race head of the Quinn family whose erratic mood swings, heart-wrenching cruelty and deep emotional distress leave an indelible mark on all her children. Through all the violence and hardship breathes the remarkable spirit of Tangy Mae, who is wise beyond her years; forced to do unspeakable things by her mother and discriminated against by the town's whites, she manages to survive and to rescue a younger sister from the same fate.
Copyright © Reed Business Information

32 Candles

32 Candles
Ernessa T. Carter
ISBN 0061957844


Davie—an ugly duckling growing up in small-town Mississippi—is positive her life couldn’t be any worse. She has the meanest mother in the South, possibly the world, and on top of that, she’s pretty sure she’s ugly. Just when she’s resigned herself to her fate, she sees a movie that will change her life—Sixteen Candles. But in her case, life doesn’t imitate art. Tormented endlessly in school with the nickname "Monkey Night," and hopelessly in unrequited love with a handsome football player, James Farrell, Davie finds that it is bittersweet to dream of Molly Ringwald endings. When a cruel school prank goes too far, Davie leaves the life she knows and reinvents herself in the glittery world of Hollywood—as a beautiful and successful lounge singer in a swanky nightclub.

Davie is finally a million miles from where she started—until she bumps into her former obsession, James Farrell. To Davie’s astonishment, James doesn’t recognize her, and she can’t bring herself to end the fantasy. She lets him fall as deeply in love with her as she once was with him. But is life ever that simple? Just as they’re about to ride off into the sunset, the past comes back with a vengeance, threatening to crush Davie’s dreams—and break her heart again.

The Kayla Chronicles

The Kayla Chronicles
Sherri Winston
ISBN 0316114308

Kayla Dean, junior feminist and future journalist, is about the break the story of a lifetime. She is auditioning for the Lady Lions dance team to prove they discriminate against the not-so-well endowed. But when she makes the team, her best friend and fellow feminist, Rosalie, is not happy.

Now a Lady Lion, Kayla is transformed from bushy-haired fashion victim to glammed-up dance diva. But does looking good and having fun mean turning her back on the cause? Can you be a strong woman and still wear really cute shoes? Soon Kayla is forced to challenge her views, coming to terms with who she is and what girl power really means.

Narrated with sharp language and just the right amount of attitude, The Kayla Chronicles is the story of a girl's struggle for self-identity despite pressure from family, friends and her own conscience. Kayla's story is snappy, fun and inspiring, sure to appeal to anyone who's every questioned who they really are.

The Thing Around Your Neck

The Thing Around Your Neck
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
ISBN 0307271072

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie burst onto the literary scene with her remarkable debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, which critics hailed as “one of the best novels to come out of Africa in years” (Baltimore Sun), with “prose as lush as the Nigerian landscape that it powerfully evokes” (The Boston Globe); The Washington Post called her “the twenty-first-century daughter of Chinua Achebe.” Her award-winning Half of a Yellow Sunbecame an instant classic upon its publication three years later, once again putting her tremendous gifts—graceful storytelling, knowing compassion, and fierce insight into her characters’ hearts—on display. Now, in her most intimate and seamlessly crafted work to date, Adichie turns her penetrating eye on not only Nigeria but America, in twelve dazzling stories that explore the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States.

In “A Private Experience,” a medical student hides from a violent riot with a poor Muslim woman whose dignity and faith force her to confront the realities and fears she’s been pushing away. In “Tomorrow is Too Far,” a woman unlocks the devastating secret that surrounds her brother’s death. The young mother at the center of “Imitation” finds her comfortable life in Philadelphia threatened when she learns that her husband has moved his mistress into their Lagos home. And the title story depicts the choking loneliness of a Nigerian girl who moves to an America that turns out to be nothing like the country she expected; though falling in love brings her desires nearly within reach, a death in her homeland forces her to reexamine them.

Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, these stories map, with Adichie’s signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them. The Thing Around Your Neck is a resounding confirmation of the prodigious literary powers of one of our most essential writers.

Soul Kiss: A Novel

Soul Kiss: A Novel
Shay Youngblood
ISBN 1573226580

Soul Kiss opens on a train from the military town of Manhattan, Kansas, en route to rural Georgia, where two of young Mariah Santos's aunts live, though to her they might as well be strangers. It is at Aunt Faith and Aunt Merleen's house, after a brief exchange of words, that Mariah's mother abandons her, hurrying down the walkway and slipping away innominately into the world at large. Devastated by the most recent of many failed relationships, tempted by the taste of drugs, and feeling herself losing a grip on her life, she chooses to leave the child in the care of relatives now rather than to jeopardize the young girl's adoration of her. It is from her beautiful, absent mother that young Mariah has inherited an unquenchable thirst for words and the feelings of comfort and hope that define them. Every morning when Mariah was a child, her mother wrote a fragrant, vibrant word on a small square of pink paper, folded it twice, and gave it to Mariah to digest; now, as she sits in shock, utterly alone, on her aunts' bottom stair, Mariah reads the words that hermotherhas penned for her on the last slip of pink: "Mama loves you. Wait here for me."

Left in the care of her elderly aunts, Mariah grows up in a state of unfulfilled longing, waiting for her mother's return. A cool relationship develops with her aunts, and the young girl grows to love the soft Faith and the stern Merleen amidst cello lessons and garden weedings. Her mother's eroticized nurturing has given way to bisexual murmurings in Mariah: She smokes cigarettes with and discovers a concupiscent attraction to her "girly-girl" friend Joy, yet also gives herself over to a young Latino ballplayer named Jesus Miguel Monteverde (though her interest in him seems to derive from hopes of becoming pregnant, "to have an angel in my arms," she confesses). Mariah is constantly longing for something to stir, as hope comes and goes for her mother's return. A curious, rebellious wanderlust steers the girl, causing her to board a bus to Los Angeles to find her father, Matisse, when the longing becomes too great. He is the hero of her imagination, a prince of images painted from her mother's descriptions. In California, however, reality asserts itself; Matisse, who loves his daughter dearly, is too tempted by lingering evidence of his former wife that he sees in Mariah to be her proper guardian, and thus her second parent fails her.

In delicious, chromatic writing, Soul Kiss explores the taboo denouement of growing up displaced in eroticized environments. "I chose specifically to use a particular style," explains Youngblood, "so that it wasn't so harsh — that it wasn't about Mariah being this victim. It was about her taking power...trying to spin a web that was really beautiful to sort of transform her life." Soul Kiss is at once Mariah's realization of her burgeoning sexuality, and her resignation to the sadness and abuse she must endure in search of a love that stays

Keeping Secrets (Mimi Patterson & Gianna Maglione #1)

Keeping Secrets (Mimi Patterson & Gianna Maglione #1)
Penny Micklebury
ISBN 1562800523

Mickelbury's debut offers a pair of lesbian sleuths--an Italian cop and a black reporter--who spend work time tracking down a serial killer and play time pursuing each other. Four closeted gay professionals, three men and one woman, have been murdered in as many months. Despite efforts by Lt. Gianna Maglione, head of the Washington, D.C., police's Hate Crimes Unit, to impose a press blackout, a gay newspaper editor has picked up on the pattern of deaths. Mimi Patterson is assigned the story and gets her first surprise when she realizes Gianna is the luscious woman she recently spotted at the gym. Mimi is also concerned for her friend Freddy Schuyler, a former football player who is being pestered by gays who want him to come out--although it could ruin the popular nightclub he now runs. Professionally, Gianna and Mimi circle each other warily, yet they must come to terms with a mutual attraction so powerful that when one is targeted by the killer, the other is also drawn into danger. Although there is a disappointing inevitability to the identity of the killer, Gianna and Mimi imbue the tale with a certain winning zest.
©1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Book of Night Women

The Book of Night Women
Marlon James
ISBN 1594488576

The Book of Night Women is a sweeping, startling novel, a true tour de force of both voice and storytelling. It is the story of Lilith, born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the eighteenth century. Even at her birth, the slave women around her recognize a dark power that they—and she—will come to both revere and fear.

The Night Women, as they call themselves, have long been plotting a slave revolt, and as Lilith comes of age and reveals the extent of her power, they see her as the key to their plans. But when she begins to understand her own feelings and desires and identity, Lilith starts to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman in Jamaica, and risks becoming the conspiracy’s weak link.

Lilith’s story overflows with high drama and heartbreak, and life on the plantation is rife with dangerous secrets, unspoken jealousies, inhuman violence, and very human emotion—between slave and master, between slave and overseer, and among the slaves themselves. Lilith finds herself at the heart of it all. And all of it told in one of the boldest literary voices to grace the page recently--—and the secret of that voice is one of the book'’s most intriguing mysteries. 

The Taste of Salt

The Taste of Salt
Martha Southgate
ISBN 1565129253

Josie Henderson loves the water and is fulfilled by her position as the only senior-level black scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. In building this impressive life for herself, she has tried to shed the one thing she cannot: her family back in landlocked Cleveland. Her adored brother, Tick, was her childhood ally as they watched their drinking father push away all the love that his wife and children were trying to give him. Now Tick himself has been coming apart and demands to be heard.

Weaving four voices into a beautiful tapestry, Southgate charts the lives of the Hendersons from the parents’ first charmed meeting to Josie’s realization that the ways of the human heart are more complex than anything seen under a microscope.

Pym: A Novel

Pym: A Novel
Mat Johnson
ISBN 0812981588

Recently canned professor of American literature Chris Jaynes is obsessed with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allan Poe’s strange and only novel. When he discovers the manuscript of a crude slave narrative that seems to confirm the reality of Poe’s fiction, he resolves to seek out Tsalal, the remote island of pure and utter blackness that Poe describes with horror. Jaynes imagines it to be the last untouched bastion of the African Diaspora and the key to his personal salvation.

He convenes an all-black crew of six to follow Pym’s trail to the South Pole in search of adventure, natural resources to exploit, and, for Jaynes at least, the mythical world of the novel. With little but the firsthand account from which Poe derived his seafaring tale, a bag of bones, and a stash of Little Debbie snack cakes, Jaynes embarks on an epic journey under the permafrost of Antarctica, beneath the surface of American history, and behind one of literature’s great mysteries. He finds that here, there be monsters.

Brown Girl in the Ring

Brown Girl in the Ring
Nalo Hopkinson
ISBN 0446674338

The rich and the privileged have fled the city, barricaded it behind roadblocks, and left it to crumble. The inner city has had to rediscover old ways -- farming, barter, herb lore. But now the monied need a harvest of bodies, and so they prey upon the helpless of the streets. With nowhere to turn, a young woman must open herself to ancient truths, eternal powers, the tragic mystery surrounding her mother and grandmother. She must bargain with gods, and give birth to new legends.

Perfect Peace

Perfect Peace
Daniel Black
ISBN 0312582676

When the seventh child of the Peace family, named Perfect, turns eight, her mother Emma Jean tells her bewildered daughter, “You was born a boy. I made you a girl. But that ain’t what you was supposed to be. So, from now on, you gon’ be a boy. It’ll be a little strange at first, but you’ll get used to it, and this’ll be over after while.” From this point forward, his life becomes a bizarre kaleidoscope of events. Meanwhile, the Peace family is forced to question everything they thought they knew about gender, sexuality, unconditional love, and fulfillment.

Wench

Wench
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
ISBN 006170654X

Tawawa House in many respects is like any other American resort before the Civil War. Situated in Ohio, this idyllic retreat is particularly nice in the summer when the Southern humidity is too much to bear. The main building, with its luxurious finishes, is loftier than the white cottages that flank it, but then again, the smaller structures are better positioned to catch any breeze that may come off the pond. And they provide more privacy, which best suits the needs of the Southern white men who vacation there every summer with their black, enslaved mistresses. It's their open secret.

Lizzie, Reenie, and Sweet are regulars at Tawawa House. They have become friends over the years as they reunite and share developments in their own lives and on their respective plantations. They don't bother too much with questions of freedom, though the resort is situated in free territory–but when truth-telling Mawu comes to the resort and starts talking of running away, things change.

To run is to leave behind everything these women value most–friends and families still down South–and for some it also means escaping from the emotional and psychological bonds that bind them to their masters. When a fire on the resort sets off a string of tragedies, the women of Tawawa House soon learn that triumph and dehumanization are inseparable and that love exists even in the most inhuman, brutal of circumstances–all while they are bearing witness to the end of an era.

My Soul to Keep

My Soul to Keep
Tananarive Due
ISBN 006105366X

When Jessica marries David, he is everything she wants in a family man: brilliant, attentive, ever youthful. Yet she still feels something about him is just out of reach. Soon, as people close to Jessica begin to meet violent, mysterious deaths, David makes an unimaginable confession: More than 400 years ago, he and other members of an Ethiopian sect traded their humanity so they would never die, a secret he must protect at any cost. Now, his immortal brethren have decided David must return and leave his family in Miami. Instead, David vows to invoke a forbidden ritual to keep Jessica and his daughter with him forever.