Central Kansas Library System

"This stunning new novel is Jodi Picoult at her finest--complete with unflinching insights, richly layered characters, and a page-turning plot with a gripping moral dilemma at its heart. Ruth Jefferson is a labor and delivery nurse at a Connecticut hospital with more than twenty years' experience. During her shift, Ruth begins a routine checkup on a newborn, only to be told a few minutes later that she's been reassigned to another patient. The parents...

Ten-year-old Dreenie feels both intrigued and frightened when she thinks about the girl nicknamed Bluish, whose leukemia is making her pale and causing her to use a wheelchair.

"Daiyu never wanted to be like the tragic heroine for whom she was named, revered for her beauty and cursed with heartbreak. But when she is kidnapped and smuggled across an ocean from China to America, Daiyu must relinquish the home and future she imagined for herself. Over the years that follow, she is forced to keep reinventing herself to survive. From a calligraphy school, to a San Francisco brothel, to a shop tucked into the Idaho mountains,...

Silence. That was the response at Cafe Society the first time Billie Holiday performed a song called "Strange Fruit." In the 1930s, Billie was known as a performer of jazz and blues music, but her song wasn't either of those things. It was a song about injustice, and it would change her life forever. Discover how two outsiders -- Billie Holiday, a young black woman raised in poverty, and Abel Meeropol, the son of Jewish immigrants -- combined their...

The true story of two African-American brothers who were kidnapped and displayed as circus freaks, and whose mother endured a 28-year struggle to get them back. The year was 1899 and the place a sweltering tobacco farm in the Jim Crow South town of Truevine, Virginia. George and Willie Muse were two little boys born to a sharecropper family. One day a white man offered them a piece of candy, setting off events that would take them around the world...

When Tony Lip, a bouncer from an Italian-American neighborhood in the Bronx, is hired to drive Dr. Don Shirley, a world-class Black pianist, on a concert tour from Manhattan to the Deep South, they must rely on The Green Book to guide them to the few establishments that were then safe for African-Americans. Confronted with racism, danger, as well as unexpected humanity and humor, they are forced to set aside differences to survive and thrive on the...

Illustrations and simple, rhyming text introduce a school where diversity is celebrated and songs, stories, and talents are shared.

A car accident brings together a group of strangers in Los Angeles. Crash takes a provocative, unflinching look at the complexities of racial tolerance in contemporary America.

"A heart-rending story of two mothers--one white, one black--struggling for truth and justice in the Civil Rights-era South. In 1958, when almost no women own and edit newspapers, Pearl Goodbar, a white mother of two teen-age girls, risks her family's financial future to buy a small, defunct Southern weekly. Before she can get the paper up and running, her husband loses his job, a smoldering desegregation crisis flames up in the state capital, and...