Showing results by narrator "Bahni Turpin" in All Categories

In The Northside, Johnson brings the untold story of Atlantic City's black community vividly to life, from the arrival of the first African Americans to Absecon Island in the early 19th century through the glory days of the "World's Playground". Drawing on dozens of personal interviews and painstaking archival research, he reveals long-forgotten details about the people on whose backs the gambling mecca was built and offers a wide-ranging survey of the accomplishments of more recent generations.

Criss-cross America - on dogsleds and ships, stagecoaches and trains - from pirate ships off the coast of the Carolinas to the peace, love, and protests of 1960s Chicago. Join fifteen of today's most talented writers of young adult literature on a thrill ride through history with American girls charting their own course. They are monsters and mediums, bodyguards and barkeeps, screenwriters and schoolteachers, heiresses and hobos.

A baby no one knows about. A dangerous hidden identity. Hookups that are off-limits. A parent whose problems your friends won't understand. Everyone keeps secrets - from themselves, from their families, from their friends - and secrets have a habit of shaping lives around them.

Rachel Merrell goes into shock when her ex-boyfriend, Jeffery Williams, begins dating her half sister Marlene Draper. At first, Rachel swears Jeff is feigning interest in Marlene just to get back at her for breaking up with him. Rachel pretends Jeff’s interest in Marlene doesn't bother her, but when they unexpectedly hit it off and love begins to blossom, Rachel can't bear to watch the happy couple. Suddenly, Rachel wants Jeff back and she is determined to get him no matter what the cost - including Marlene's happiness.

Twenty-three dollars and 11 cents - that’s all that 35-year-old Chloe Davis Michaels has to her name after she is driven from her home and career as a jet-setting Hollywood publicist, desperate to protect her unborn child from her crazed newlywed husband. She thought she had it all. Now Chloe seeks refuge in her Midwestern hometown to “get prayed up” by the women in her family. Chloe’s impromptu homecoming takes us into the world of eight African-American women who make up the Davis clan - three mothers and five daughters, including Chloe.

Buckhanon takes us into the life of 15-year-old Shivana Montgomery, who believes all black women wind up the same: single and raising children alone, like her mother. Until the sudden visit of her free-spirited Aunt Jewel, Shivana spends her days desperately struggling to understand life and the growing pains of her environment. When she accidentally becomes pregnant by an older man and must decide what to do, she begins a journey towards adulthood with only a mysterious voice inside to guide her.

In the New England university town of Elm Harbor, a murder begins to crack the veneer that has hidden the racial complications of the town's past, the secrets of a prominent family, and the most hidden bastions of African-American political influence. At the center is Lemaster Carlyle, the university president, and his wife, Julia Carlyle, a deputy dean at the divinity school - African Americans living in "the heart of whiteness".

Joan Steinau Lester's newest book looks that the emotional and social experience of Nina, a teen girl living in LA who feels caught between two worlds - the "white" world of her mother and the "black" world of her father. This nowhere land of race becomes harder to navigate when the support system her parents offered is shattered by their divorce.

Harlem is home to all kinds of kids. Jin sees life passing her by from the window of her family's bodega. Alex wants to help the needy one shelter at a time but can't tell anyone who she really is. Elvin's living on Harlem's cold, lonely streets, surviving on his own after his grandfather was mysteriously attacked. When these three strangers join forces to find out what happened to Elvin's grandfather, their digging leads them to an enigmatic artist whose missing masterpieces are worth a fortune.

Thirteen extremely valuable pieces of art have been stolen from one of the most secretive museums in the world. A Vermeer has vanished. A Manet is missing. And nobody has any idea where they and the other eleven artworks might be...or who might have stolen them. The Players - Calder, Petra, and Tommy - are no strangers to heists and puzzles. Now they've been matched with two new sleuths - Zoomy, a very small boy with very thick glasses, and Early, a girl who treasures words...

At the end of Not a Day Goes By, the terminally bisexual John Basil Henderson declares: “I’m back, in full form. And I’m out there. Roamin’. And switching lanes.” Now, in Any Way the Wind Blows, Basil, good-looking gadabout and homme fatal, is back at the top of his game (razzle-dazzling both the women and the men). All is well until Basil’s picture-perfect life starts to unravel.

Georgia Douglas Johnson was a key contributor to the Harlem Renaissance - hosting an influential salon, breaking new ground as a Black playwright, and playing an important role as an anti-lynching activist. Her poetry, however, is what first brought her to national attention, and in the early works collected here, her wide-ranging talents are already quite evident. In The Heart of a Woman, Johnson’s exquisite verse captures the full emotional terrain of womanhood. These are poems about love and disillusionment, empowerment and fulfillment, loneliness and joy.

At the Nutcracker School of Ballet in Harlem, young dancers learn to chassé, plié, and jeté with their Sugar Plum Sisters--but things don't always go to plan! As the girls encounter challenges both on and off stage, they'll need the support of their classmates to carry them through with aplomb.

Brenda Black prides herself on her logical and orderly mind. She studies anatomy books and idolizes Leonardo da Vinci. But things go haywire when her spoiled cousin Tiffany comes to visit. Fed up with Tiffany's bragging, Brenda snaps when Tiffany implies that Brenda is not cultured enough to know who Miss Camilla Freeman is--Miss Camilla Freeman, the very famous prima ballerina. Brenda tells Tiffany that not only does she know who Camilla Freeman is, but she happens to own an autographed pair of her toe shoes.

Lucille Arnetta Love has always lived on the run. In her family's traveling band, Lucille was billed as The Little Girl with the Big Voice, belting out gospel hymns and never staying in once place too long--all to keep attention off the real reason the Loves had to flee across America. Unaware of the danger, Lucille dreamed of breaking out of the backwoods and being big enough for Broadway. Nearly eleven years after setting out on the road with her parents, Lucille is finally discovered by Marcus Williams, a young talent manager who whisks her away to chase her dreams.

Now the Congress of Animals is in control, unforgiving, and debating the fate of the planet’s most reviled species. The popular ruling: Exterminate humankind without exception. But a curious mare, coming of age, is making a case for a seemingly gentle person she longs to save - a wish for mercy that could once again unbalance the new and righteous nature of the world.

A haunting story of fatherhood, national identity, and what it means to be an immigrant in America today, Nafkote Tamirat's The Parking Lot Attendant explores how who we love, the choices we make, and the places we’re from combine to make us who we are. The story begins on an undisclosed island where the unnamed narrator and her father are the two newest and least-liked members of a commune that has taken up residence there. This detached existence only makes Ayale’s arrival on the scene more intoxicating. The unofficial king of Boston’s Ethiopian community, Ayale is a born hustler.

Evander “Vandy” Myrick became a cop to fulfill her father’s expectations. After her world cratered, she became a private eye to satisfy her own. Now she's back in Queenstown, New Jersey, her childhood home, in search of solace and recovery. It's a small community of nine thousand souls crammed into twelve square miles, fenced by cornfields, warehouses, pharma labs, and tract housing. As a Black woman, privacy is hard to come by in "Q-Town," and worth guarding.

The last thing Tasha Washington wants is to move from her home in Savannah to a trailer park in Middle-of-Nowhere, Georgia. But when her mother dies and Tasha is taken in by her father—a man she’s never met, who abandoned her mom when Tasha was just a baby—she doesn’t have much of a choice. At least, she thinks, she won’t have to spend much time with him—something that becomes clear when he dumps Tasha with her grandmother and disappears to be with his new girlfriend.

It's the opportunity of a lifetime: Feyi is about to be given the chance to escape the City's blistering heat for a dream island holiday: poolside cocktails, beach sunsets, and elaborate meals. And as the sun goes down on her old life, our heroine also might just be ready to open her heart to someone new. The only problem is, she's falling for the one man she absolutely can't have.