Search Results: Titles starting with B from Oasis in the Diaspora

Simon and Schuster, 2003. 1. Very Good. Sixteen-year-old Jericho is awaiting initiation to the Warriors of Distinction, the oldest and most exclusive club in school—but how high a price will he have to pay to belong? Find out in this first novel in Sharon M. Draper’s Jericho Trilogy.When Jericho is invited to pledge for the Warriors of Distinction, he thinks his life can’t get any better. As the most exclusive club in school, the Warriors give the best parties, go out with the hottest girls, and great grades are a given. When Arielle, one of the finest girls in his class, starts coming on to him once the pledge announcements are made, Jericho is determined to do anything to become a member… But as the initiation week becomes progressively harrowing, Jericho is forced to make choices he’s not entirely comfortable with. And one member seems to have it in for the sole female pledge in the group…a pledge who will stop at nothing to show she can handle the pressure. But when is she being… Read More

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1987. 1. Very Good. Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination.It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who calls herself Beloved.Sethe works at "beating back the past," but it is alive in all of them. It keeps Denver fearful of straying from the house. It fuels the sadness that has settled into Baby Suggs' "desolated center where… Read More

W.W. Norton, 1997. 1st. Fine. "All my life I have passed invisibly into the white world, and all my life I have felt that sudden and alarming moment of consciousness there, of remembering I am black. It may feel like emerging too quickly from deep in the ocean, or touching an electric fence, or like a deer paralyzed in the headlights of an oncoming car," writes Toi Derricotte, a light-skinned black woman and accomplished poet. This exquisitely written work began as sketchy journal entries over twenty years ago when Derricotte moved into an all-white neighborhood near New York City. "I wanted to capture the language of self-hate, the pain of re-emerging thought and buried memory and consciousness." The Black Notebooks is an intimate record of the author's encounters with family, neighbors, friends, students, and colleagues where she is forced to question what it means to be a black woman living in a racially divided world. Hardcover

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L. Rienner Publishers, 1997. Fair. Publisher description: This work tells the story of growing up black in the colonial world of Martinique. Not only does the young hero, José, have to fight the ignorance and poverty of plantation life, but he must also learn to survive the all-pervasive French cultural saturation--to remain true to himself, proud of his race and his family. His ally in this struggle is his grandmother, M'man Tine, who fights her own weariness to release at least one child from the plantation village, a dirt street lined with the shacks of sugarcane workers. First published in 1950, La rue cases-nègres was inspired by Richard Wright's Black Boy. "Everything in it is autobiographical," wrote Zobel, "but the story was patterned after my own aesthetics of composition." The movie adaptation, honored at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, has been released in the U.S. as Sugar Cane Alley.

Random House Publishing Group, 2008. 1st. Pristine. #1 bestselling author Nikki Turner returns with an explosive new novel about a woman at an emotional crossroads–and the men left in her wake.Isis Tatum knows firsthand the way love can mess up a person. After all, she saw her mother drive a truck through the home of her father’s mistress before killing her dad. And ever since Isis was a teenager, her love life has been a series of disasters: Her first sweetheart was executed by the state of Virginia, and her next lover was sent to jail for murder. Now Isis is a successful jewelry designer, but she remains a failure with men. When she meets Logic, a Las Vegas high roller who treats her like a princess, Isis reckons she’s finally struck gold–literally. Logic sees to it that her custom pieces of jewelry are seen on the hottest rap stars and pro athletes.But when this Mr. Right ends up in jail too, Isis starts to believe that she’s cursed, that she’s a true Black Widow. Always one to… Read More

Milkweed Editions, 1989. 1st. Good. Stories deal with the interaction between native Africans and American diplomats, volunteer workers, and missionaries Signed copy
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Strebor Books, 2007. 1st. Pristine. From bestselling author Allison Hobbs comes the sassy, savvy tale of a woman consumed by a secret sex life, wealth, and indulgence—obsessions she will go to any length to fulfill.Milan Walden is living the high life. She has it all, a high-power career, respect from her peers, and unlimited business potential. But when she finds herself unemployed and facing criminal charges, she flees the only life she's ever known to start again. Milan accepts a position as a live-in companion to ailing millionaire Noah Brockington. Her hunger for glamour and luxury drives her into a twisted relationship with her employer that soon results in a bizarre prenup and frantic preparations for the strangest wedding anyone could expect. Fighting off Noah’s obsession with quirky sex, greedy family members, and the yearnings of her heart, Milan finds a new zest for life as she strives to become the sole heir of the Brockington fortune. A Bona Fide Gold Digger is an addictive spin… Read More

Counterpoint, 2002. 1st. Pristine. Catherine McKinley was one of only a few thousand African American and bi-racial children adopted by white couples in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Raised in a small, white New England town, she had a persistent longing for the more diverse community that would better understand and encompass her. In an era shaped by the rhetoric of Black Power and Black Pride, McKinley's coming of age entailed her own detailed investigation into her birth history, a search complicated by the terms of a closed adoption that denied her all knowledge of the circumstances of her birth.The Book of Sarahs traces McKinley's own time of revelations: after a five-year period marked by dead ends and disappointments, she finds her birth mother and a half-sister named Sarah, the name that was originally given to her. When she locates her birth father and meets several of his eleven other children she begins to see the whole mosaic of parentage - African American, WASP, Jewish, Native… Read More

Soho, 1994. 1. Fine. An unforgettable novel that shimmers with the wonder and terror of its author's native Haiti. Set in the island's impoverished villages and in New York's Haitian community, this is the story of Sophie Caco, who was conceived in an act of violence, abandoned by her mother and then summoned to America. In New York, Sophie discovers that Haiti imposes harsh rules on its own. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved. Hardcover
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Dutton, 1999. 1st. Fine. The time is the 1970s. The place is the coast of Guyana, a world of color and light, dust and heat, flesh and earth. Here in the cool, wood-floored home that doubles as a school and a community center, a young girl opens her window and breathes in the redolence of a Buxton Spice mango tree. And asks the tree to tell her its secret - and the secret of its indifference. Buxton Spice is the song of Oonya Kempadoo's young narrator, Lula, and the song of her ill-fated town of Tamarind Grove: its colorful inhabitants, its eccentric families, its sweeping joys and sudden tragedies. Here are the mud-red banks where Lula and her friends slide down into the milky tea water of the Broadie Canal. Here is the emerging sexuality of young girls who can see what the madness of desire - and men - can reap. And here, in a village torn between cultures, between the future and the past, will come an explosion of politics and violence ignited by the eternal human dividers of race, money, and… Read More