Ocean State Libraries

Chicago fifth-grader Simon, an aspiring rapper who lacks self-confidence, uses his rhymes to help bring his community together.

"When the electricity goes out, twelve-year-old Eddie and his friends set out to investigate what is going on when they make the startling discovery that they are the only ones left in their neighborhood--and perhaps the only people left anywhere." --

Enduring a hardscrabble existence as the children of alcoholic and absent parents, four siblings from a coastal Mississippi town prepare their meager stores for the arrival of Hurricane Katrina while struggling with such challenges as a teen pregnancy and a dying litter of prize pups.

"Every Tuesday Lola and her mother visit their local library to return and check out books, attend story readings, and share a special treat." --

A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait...

"In the years before the Civil War, Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, struggles through the miles-long march, seeks comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother, opening herself to a world beyond this world."--

"Dream Variation," one of Langston Hughes's most celebrated poems, about the dream of a world free of discrimination and racial prejudice, is now a picture book stunningly illustrated by Daniel Miyares...An African-American boy faces the harsh reality of segregation and racial prejudice, but he dreams of a different life--one full of freedom, hope, and wild possibility, where he can fling his arms wide in the face of the sun"--

Simple rhyming text and photographs depict African American children celebrating Halloween.

The first African men, women, and children in colonial America did not arrive with dreams of freedom or hopes of a new, better life. They arrived after a torturous 90-day journey called the Middle Passage. And they arrived as slaves. Since that time, African-Americans have suffered, triumphed, despaired, and dreamed. Through U.S. history, nowhere are the hopes and fears of the black experience expressed more convincingly than on the faces of black...