Happy April! We are centering Black-owned independent bookstores every week. Check out Win’s Books of Goose Creek, SC.
Happy Reading!
Timid: A Graphic Novel
Cecil Hall and his family have just moved from Florida to Massachusetts, near Boston. Cecil is anxious about making friends because he doesn't know where he'll fit in. His older sister, Leah, thinks he should befriend the other black kids at his new school, but Cecil isn't sure how he'd go about doing that. He wants to be known for his comics-making talent, anyway. But the few kids who are impressed by Cecil's art aren't always nice to him. When one of his drawings is misused and gets him into serious trouble, can Cecil stand up for himself and figure out who his real friends are?
(Middle Grade)
The Orange Wall: An Acorn Book (Rainbow Days #3)
This series is part of Scholastic's early reader line, Acorn, aimed at children who are learning to read. With easy-to-read text, a short-story format, plenty of humor, and full-color artwork on every page, these books will boost reading confidence and fluency. Acorn books plant a love of reading and help readers grow!
Zoya can't wait to paint her bedroom a new glittery color. But Zoya can't decide on just one color! So she decides she wants a fun, multi-colored room! Will Zoya -- with her puppy Coco's help -- be able to give her bedroom the perfect makeover?
With Kai Robinson's vibrant, full-color artwork and Valerie Bolling's engaging, easy-to-read text throughout, this sparkly series is perfect for beginning readers!
(Children’s)
Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves
In gorgeous and timely pieces, Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves is a lush journey into wildness and Black being. Lanham notices nature through seasonal shifts, societal unrest, and deeply personal reflection and traces a path from bitter history to the present predicament. Drawing canny connections between the precarity of nature and the long arm of racism, the collection offers reconciliation and eco-reparation as hopeful destinations from our current climate of division. In Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves, Lanham mines the deep connection to ancestors through the living world and tunes his unique voice toward embracing the radical act of joy.
(Nonfiction)
Blackwildgirl: A Writer's Journey to Take Back Her Superpower
Blackwildgirl begins her life as a queen superpower. When she is still a child, however, her parents strike a bargain that leads to her dethronement--and sets her on a forty-five-year journey to become the warrior she was born to be: Blackwildgoddess.
Join an interactive adventure exploring the private life and journals of a young Black girl, beginning at the age of eight, as she struggles and evolves from a tennis player, musician, and college student to become a wife, mother, lawyer, scholar, and writer. Documenting revelations and reflections during her twelve-stage initiation journey in America and the African diaspora, this intimate, introspective autobiography--composed of acts, stages, scenes, and letters to Love--reveals how writing can unearth and give life to women's powerful, sassy, and willful spirits.
Authentic, vulnerable, and spirit-filled, this captivating and enthralling road map is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the experiences of girls as they seek to become wild women--women who are fierce and fearless; women who are warriors for themselves and others; and women who are committed to excavating and cultivating their spiritual gardens to manifest and fulfill their destiny in the world.
Be sure to get the companion journal, Blackwildgirl: Finding Your Superpower to journey and journal along as you read. Write your own story. Discover your own inner wisdom. Own your power and purpose. Celebrate yourself.
(Nonfiction)
Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill: Alexander Hamilton's Old Harlem Neighborhood Through the Centuries
It was the neighborhood where Alexander Hamilton built his country home, George Gershwin wrote his first hit, a young Norman Rockwell discovered he liked to draw, and Ralph Ellison wrote Invisible Man. Through words and pictures, Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill traces the transition of this picturesque section of Harlem from lush farmland in the early 1600s to its modern-day growth as a unique Manhattan neighborhood highlighted by stunning architecture, Harlem Renaissance gatherings, and the famous residents who called it home.
Stretching from approximately 135th Street and Edgecombe Avenue to around 165th, all the way to the Hudson River, this small section in the Heights of West Harlem is home to so many signifi cant events, so many extraordinary people, and so much of New York's most stunning architecture, it's hard to believe one place could contain all that majesty. Author Davida Siwisa James brings to compelling literary life the unique residents and dwelling places of this Harlem neighborhood that stands at the heart of the country's founding. Here she uncovers the long-lost history of the transitions to Hamilton Grange in the aftermath of Alexander Hamilton's death and the building boom from about 1885 to 1930 that made it one of Manhattan's most historic and architecturally desirable neighborhoods, now and a century ago. The book also shares the story of the LaGuardia High School of Music & Art, one of the fi rst in the nation to focus on arts and music. The author chronicles the history of the James A. Bailey House, as well as the Morris-Jumel Mansion, Manhattan's oldest surviving residence and famously known as George Washington's headquarters at the start of the American Revolution.
By telling the history of its vibrant people and the beautiful architecture of this lovely, well-maintained historic landmark neighborhood, James also dispels the misconception that Harlem was primarily a ghetto wasteland. The book also touches upon the Great Migration of Blacks leaving the South who landed in Harlem, helping it become the mecca for African Americans, including such Harlem Renaissance artists and luminaries as Thurgood Marshall, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Mary Lou Williams, Paul Robeson, Regina Anderson Andrews, and W. E. B. Du Bois.
(Nonfiction)
Someone Birthed Them Broken: Stories
In this startling collection of short fiction, Ama Asantewa Diaka creates a vibrant portrait of young Ghanaians' today, captured in the experiences of characters whose lives bump against one other in friendship, passion, hope, and heartache. Men like Opoku Sr., not yet forty and struggling to keep his family's cocoa business afloat after his father's unexpected passing. Opoku strains under the burden of caring for his eight younger siblings and the child whose mother ran off. When his new girlfriend tells him she's pregnant, he knows he has nothing left to give.
Years later, that girlfriend's son, Opoku Jr., now faces his own troubles, including his girlfriend Boatemaa, who (correctly) suspects he is sneaking around, and Amoafoa, the woman he's seeing on the side. And there is John, who confides to his crush Baaba about a surprising encounter with a male friend over a game of FIFA; Baaba, who falls into a whirlwind romance with her professor that ends in violence; and their friend Ayeley, who is learning to accept pleasure after being raised to believe it is sinful.
Diaka charts this constellation of interconnected lives in thirteen stories, exploring themes which run through the collection like a current: corruption and economic hardship, trauma and infidelity, shame, neglect, and the tribulations of the female body. In telling their stories, Diaka illuminates hope, freedom, and triumph that can be found in the everyday--the bonds between women, the joys of love and sex and art and dancing, the possibility of repair and redemption.
(Short Stories)
The Span of a Small Forever: Poems
With breathtaking lyricism and a vulnerability that pierces the heart, April Gibson journeys through the emotional abysses, the daily pleasures, the frustrations, and the joys of being a Black woman living with chronic illness.
Gibson offers a unique perspective on "the body," viewing disability and healthcare through both feminist and socio-economic lenses filtered by race and faith. Through gorgeous sensory language that migrates memories, from carefree innocence to the ravages formed in its absence, Gibson bears witness to grief, courage, and resistance to redefine herself on her own terms.
Gibson presents her body as a "looking glass" that re-envisions illness, womanhood, motherhood, religious relics and collective loss through her physicality, through her lamenting, through her unearthing, reckoning and rebirth. Not only do we see her, but see the "we" in her. The Span of a Small Forever is both testimony and transformation--heart-shattering in its honesty, it ultimately offers us transcendent beauty, nourishment, and the strength we need to go on in our lives.
(Poetry)
American Daughters
At the turn of the twentieth century, in a time of great change, two women--separated by societal status and culture but bound by their expected roles as the daughters of famed statesmen--forged a lifelong friendship.
Portia Washington's father Booker T. Washington was formerly enslaved and spent his life championing the empowerment of Black Americans through his school, known popularly as Tuskegee Institute, as well as his political connections. Dedicated to her father's values, Portia contributed by teaching and performing spirituals and classical music. But a marriage to a controlling and jealous husband made fulfilling her dreams much more difficult.
When Theodore Roosevelt assumed the presidency, his eldest daughter Alice Roosevelt joined him in the White House. To try to win her father's approval, she eagerly jumped in to help him succeed, but Alice's political savvy and nonconformist behavior alienated as well as intrigued his opponents and allies. When she married a congressman, she carved out her own agendas and continued espousing women's rights and progressive causes.
Brought together in the wake of their fathers' friendship, these bright and fascinating women helped each other struggle through marriages, pregnancies, and political upheaval, supporting each other throughout their lives.
(Historical Fiction)