Josh and his twin brother Jordan love the game of basketball and they're good at it, which isn't surprising since their dad is a retired pro player. Unfortunately, when Jordan falls for a girl at school, Josh starts to feel like the third wheel and he doesn't handle it well.

Last school year, I was excited to introduce my seventh grade students to Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor. Teaching at an all boys military academy, I had carefully selected texts that would give students a broad understanding of American society during different historical periods, while also giving them stories of young people whose lives or personalities they could relate to. I deliberately chose to balance the curriculum between male and female authors..

Arnold Spirit, who is known on the Reservation as Junior, decides to attend high school at the wealthier white school about 22 miles away from home. While many people on the Spokane Indian Reservation, including his best friend Rowdy see it as a betrayal, his older sister finds his courage to leave the Res an inspiration.

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry tells the story of Cassie Logan and her family fighting for their land and dignity in the Jim Crow South. Cassie and her three brothers - Stacey, Christopher-John and Little Man - were raised to take pride in themselves, their families and education - so its a culture shock for them to go out into the world and discover that they're treated as less than because of their race. They don't take the ill-treatment quietly however...

Homegoing follows the story of two half-sisters and their descendants from the Gold Coast (Ghana) from the beginning of British colonialism and the slave trade to modern day. In Ghana, the protagonists hover on the edges of a family involved in the slave trade, while across the Atlantic their family members experience slavery and discrimination in a myriad of forms. Spanning a large breadth of human experiences, the characters retain a strong sense of themselves while facing

A young black man flees the south and moves to a big city in the North in the first half of the 1930s, where he becomes involved in a communist party or brotherhood. Yet, there is a striking difference between the story of the very real Wright and the main character in Invisible Man whose names the reader is never privy too - Wright sees what the white reader does not, whereas the modern white reader of the Invisible Man sees what the narrator does not.

An intricately beautiful and compelling novel, Obasan begins with the death of the narrator Naomi Nakane’s Uncle. As an adult, Naomi had tried hard to separate herself from her childhood experience in Canada during World War II which she lived through, but didn’t necessarily understand as a child. Drawn back to her old family home to help put her Uncle to rest, Naomi is pushed by her Aunt Emily towards a deeper understanding of her family’s and the country’s history. 

In Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, Tayo's Laguna community seeks to help him heal from the PTSD that he, like many of his peers, has brought back with him from World War II. A story that echoes the familiar tales of alcohol abuse and struggles with racism and belonging encountered in Alexie's work, the overlap between the returned veterans' PTSD and the multi-generational trauma of reservation life and colonialism lays the cultural foundation for a plot that drew me in and l

SUMMARY Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee tells the journey of a young girl from India who as a grown woman finds herself in a small farming...

Warning: Mild Spoilers Our names identify us, individualize us, and connect us. Yet, as Shakespeare writes in Romeo and Juliet , "A rose...