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During a volatile year of self-discovery in the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, three friends preparing for an uncertain future head to a cabin to bid goodbye to their former lives--a moment of reckoning that leaves each of them irrevocably altered.
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2023 National Book Award Nonfiction Longlist
2023 Reading Challenge November Bonus Category: Indigenous Authors
2024 Reading Challenge: Book about a topic you don't know much about
2023 Reading Challenge November Bonus Category: Indigenous Authors
2024 Reading Challenge: Book about a topic you don't know much about
Description
The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, with a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America.00Ned Blackhawk...
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English
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In the summer of 1974 a heatwave blankets Boston and Mary Pat Fennessey is trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. Mary Pat has lived her entire life in the housing projects of "Southie," the Irish American enclave that stubbornly adheres to old tradition and stands proudly apart. One night Mary Pat's teenage daughter Jules stays out late and doesn't come home. That same evening, a young Black man is found dead, struck by a subway train...
5) Dear Martin
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Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.8 - AR Pts: 6
Language
English
Description
Writing letters to the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., seventeen-year-old college-bound Justyce McAllister struggles to face the reality of race relations today and how they are shaping him.
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English
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"From the beet fields of North Dakota to the National Forest campgrounds of California to Amazon's CamperForce program in Texas, employers have discovered a new, low-cost labor pool, made up largely of transient older Americans. Finding that social security comes up short, often underwater on mortgages, these invisible casualties of the Great Recession have taken to the road by the tens of thousands in late-model RVs, travel trailers, and vans, forming...
Author
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
English
Description
"A mother-daughter story of reinvention-about an African American woman who unexpectedly inherits a sugarcane farm in Louisiana Why exactly Charley Bordelon's late father left her eight hundred sprawling acres of sugarcane land in rural Louisiana is as mysterious as it was generous. Recognizing this as a chance to start over, Charley and her eleven-year-old daughter, Micah, say good-bye to Los Angeles. They arrive just in time for growing season but...
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The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself,...
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 3.9 - AR Pts: 5
Language
English
Description
"Celeste knows she should be excited to spend two weeks at her grandparents' lake house with her brother, Owen, and their cousins Capri and Daisy, but she's not. Bugs, bad cell reception, and the dark waters of the lake... no thanks. On top of that, she just failed her swim test and hates being in the water-it's terrifying. But her grandparents are strong believers in their family knowing how to swim, especially having grown up during a time of segregation...
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2024 Reading Challenge: A coming of age story
2024 Reading Challenge: Read a book with a friend or book club
2024 Reading Challenge: Read a book with a friend or book club
Description
Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar....
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"When her dreams of rising through the police ranks like her late father crash around her, 26-year-old Emma Djan is unsure what will become of her life in Accra. Through a sympathetic former colleague, Emma gets an interview with a private detective agency tracking down missing persons, thefts, and marital infidelities. It's not the future she imagined, but it's her best option. Meanwhile, Gordon Tilson, a middle-aged widower in Washington, DC, has...
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Description
"Free-spirited, living on the fly, Vanessa Hayes is still always down for traditional family holiday fun--until now. She's making her oft-delayed wish finally come true: Christmas in Paris, the glittering City of Lights. But when her passport gets delayed, it's too late for Vanessa to rebook. Now it looks like the Yuletide she longs for won't happen. Until a stranger suddenly enters her life, and changes it forever ... Overwhelmed by responsibility,...
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As her marriage crumbles, a woman is faced with an incredible opportunity : a return to Paris, the magical city of her youth, to take over her late uncle's locksmithing shop. But she realizes the city holds secrets about her family that could change her forever... -- Back cover.
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English
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"From the #1 bestselling author of The Historian comes an engrossing novel that spans the past and the present--and unearths the dark secrets of Bulgaria, a beautiful and haunted country. A young American woman, Alexandra Boyd, has traveled to Sofia, Bulgaria, hoping that life abroad will salve the wounds left by the loss of her beloved brother. Soon after arriving in this elegant East European city, however, she helps an elderly couple into a taxi--and...
Author
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English
Description
You may know W. Kamau Bell from his new, Emmy-nominated hit show on CNN, United Shades of America. Or maybe you’ve read about him in the New York Times, which called him “the most promising new talent in political comedy in many years.” Or maybe from The New Yorker, fawning over his brand of humor writing: "Bell’s gimmick is intersectional progressivism: he treats racial, gay, and women’s issues as...
Author
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
English
Description
June Andersen is professionally successful but her personal life is marred by unhappiness. Unexpectedly, she is called to settle her great-aunt Ruby's estate and determine the fate of Bluebird Books, the children's bookstore Ruby founded in the 1940s. Amidst the store's papers, June stumbles upon letters between her great-aunt and the late Margaret Wise Brown and steps into the pages of American literature.
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English
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"In August 1908, three unknown riders arrived in Cheyenne, Wyoming, their hats adorned with wildflowers, to compete in the worlds greatest rodeo. Steer-roping virtuoso Ikua Purdy and his cousins Jack Low and Archie Kaaua had travelled 4,200 miles from Hawaii, of all places, to test themselves against the toughest riders in the West. Dismissed by whites, who considered themselves the only true cowboys, the native Hawaiians would astonish the country,...
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
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English
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Description
"The late Anthony Veasna So's debut story collection, Afterparties, was a landmark publication, hailed as a "bittersweet triumph for a fresh voice silenced too soon" (Fresh Air). And he was equally known for his comic, soulful essays, published in n+1, the New Yorker, and The Millions. Songs on Endless Repeat gathers those essays together, along with previously unpublished fiction. Written with razor-sharp wit and an unflinching eye, the essays examine...
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Readalikes for 'Martyr!'
The Sentence "Totally Biased List of Tookie's Favorite Books" Book Discussion
The Sentence "Totally Biased List of Tookie's Favorite Books" Book Discussion
Description
"Brilliant, heartbreaking, tender, and highly original - poet Ocean Vuong's debut novel is a sweeping and shattering portrait of a family, and a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born--a history whose epicenter is rooted in...
20) Calypso
Author
Language
English
Description
David Sedaris sets his formidable powers of observation toward middle age and mortality. This is beach reading for people who detest beaches, required reading for those who loathe small talk, and also Sedaris' darkest and warmest book yet.
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