Central Kansas Library System

In Uncle Tom's Cabin , Harriet Beecher Stowe created America's first black literary hero as well as the nation's antecedent protest novel. The novel's vast influence on attitudes towards African American slavery was considered an incitation towards the American Civil War; conjointly, its powerful anti-slavery message resonated with readers around the world at its time of publication. With unashamed sentimentality and expressions of faith, Harriet...

While on trial as an accomplice to a murder, sixteen-year-old Steve Harmon records his experiences in prison and in the courtroom in the form of a film script as he tries to come to terms with the course his life has taken.

This is the story of the coon dog, Sounder, and his devotion to his master. It is also a story of humans: the father, a black sharecropper, who must feed his children, the timid mother fighting for survival, and the son who grows to maturity through his father's prison term and the devotion of Sounder.

The ordinary interactions and everyday routines of the Watsons, an African American family living in Flint, Michigan, are drastically changed after they go to visit Grandma in Alabama in the summer of 1963.

Twelve-year-old Toswiah finds her life changed when her family enters the witness protection program. Evie Thomas is not who she used to be. Once she had a best friend, a happy home and a loving grandmother living nearby. Once her name was Toswiah. Now, everything is different. Her family has been forced to move to a new place and change their identities. But that's not all that has changed. Her once lively father has become depressed and quiet....

Greeder's summer at her uncle's farm is made special because of her friendship with a very tall, composed woman who raises hogs and who closely resembles the magazine photograph of a Watutsi queen.

A young girl eagerly awaits a coming rainstorm to bring relief from the oppressive summer heat. "Come on, Rain!" Tess pleads to the sky as listless vines and parched plants droop in the endless heat. Then the clouds roll in and the rain pours. And Tess, her friends, and their mothers join in together in a rain dance to celebrate the shower that renews both body and spirit.

Related episodes in seven-year-old Julian's life which includes getting into trouble with his younger brother Huey, planting a garden, what he did to try to grow taller, losing a tooth, and finding a new friend.

Retells the life of the legendary African American hero who raced against a steam drill to cut through a mountain.

In 1855 two thirteen-year-old girls, one white and one black, run away from a southern farm and make the difficult journey north to freedom, living to recount their story forty-one years later to two similar young girls. Susannah, who hates slavery, is given a slave when she moves to Virginia to live with her uncle and his family. Best Books for Young Teen Readers. Two unhappy 13-year-old girls -- one a slave, the other a white orphan -- disguise...