This Bitter Earth

Author	Delores Phillips
ISBN	1569473781

Bakersfield, 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...

Author	J. California Cooper
ISBN	0385411723

"History. Lived, not written, is such a thing not to understand always, but to marvel over. Time is so forever that life has many instances when you can say 'Once upon a time' thousands of times in one life."

From the first line of this book, one that I read and read and read again, I was impressed....

Author	Tayari Jones
ISBN	0446690899

For me, this is the first story that I can ever remember reading that shared my voice as a child growing up in a major Southern city. It took place at a time when, first of all, it's tough growing up and being eleven years old and then to deal with a real-live nationally-known bogeyman lurking around the city...

Author	Andrea Smith
ISBN	0385336233

Canaan Creek, South Carolina, in the 1950s is a tiny town where the close-knit African-American community is united by long-term friendships and church ties. Bonnie Wilder has lived here, on Blackberry Corner, all her life, and would be content but for her deep desire to have a child. She and her husband...

Author	Ernessa T. Carter
ISBN	0061957844

This debut novel of longing for family, love, and acceptance finds some interesting territory before settling too early into inevitability. Davidia Jones, a nerdy child of poverty, is abused by her alcoholic mother and despicable father and is the subject of merciless taunting at her high school....

Author	Diane McKinney-Whetstone
ISBN	0684837242

Diane McKinney-Whetstone's lyrical first novel, Tumbling, vividly captures a tightly knit African-American neighborhood in South Philadelphia during the forties and fifties. Its central characters, Herbie and Noon, are a loving but unconventional couple whose marriage remains unconsummated...

Author

Kalisha Buckhanon

"Baby, the first thing I need to know from you is do you believe I killed my father?"

So begins Upstate, a powerful story told through letters between seventeen-year-old Antonio and his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Natasha, set in the 1990's in New York. Antonio and Natasha's world is turned...

Author	Tina McElroy Ansa
ISBN	0156000776

The bestselling tale-powerful, compassionate, humorous-of the three Lovejoy sisters reunited in their hometown of Mulberry, Georgia, on the occasion of their mother’s death. As the emotionally scarred Lovejoys prepare for their mother’s funeral, the spirit of the selfish and manipulative...

Author	Bebe Moore Campbell
ISBN	0425186318

Wow, this book was so absurdly and comprehensively heartwarming! The whole goshdarn cast of white and black characters successfully work through every one of their issues with racial identity / abandoning or overbearing mommies and daddies / generational grudges / discrimination and privilege....