It's hatching season and Jemison Elementary is buzzing about the arrival of the baby chicks. Fifth-grader Jillian must learn to speak and break free of her shell to enter her school's competition and keep her promise to her grandmother.

Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, people will notice her, and her world will be different. The story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, the tragic heroine of Toni Morrison's haunting first novel, grew out of her memory of a girlhood friend who wanted blue eyes. Shunned by the town's...

Black girls are leading, organizing, advocating, and creating. They are starting nonprofits. Building political coalitions. Promoting diverse literature. Fighting cancer. Improving water quality. Working to prevent gun violence. Are we ready to learn from their leadership? "Black women are literally at the helm of every movement," says Tyah-Amoy Roberts, an activist and a survivor of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting. "Every push for social justice....

In exchange for a bad debt, an Anglo-Dutch trader takes on Florens, a young slave girl, who feels abandoned by her slave mother and who searches for love--first from an older servant woman at her master's new home, and then from a handsome free blacksmith, in a novel set in late seventeenth-century America.

Twelve-year-old Candice Miller is spending the summer in Lambert, South Carolina, in the old house that belonged to her grandmother, who died after being dismissed as city manager for having the city tennis courts dug up looking for buried treasure--but when she finds the letter that sent her grandmother on the treasure hunt, she finds herself caught up in the mystery and, with the help of her new friend and fellow book-worm, Brandon, she sets out...

"Melody is an optimistic, enthusiastic girl growing up in Detroit, Michigan during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. She is excited and proud to share a special surprise with her family. She's been chosen to sing a solo for Youth Day at her church! But what song will she choose? She gets advice from her big brother, and is also inspired by her older sister, but it's the inspirational words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that help her pick the...

In 1865, at the end of the Civil War, thirteen-year-old Abby Joyner continues to live with her grandparents on the isolated Virginia plantation where she was raised, although they are now free. Abby's main concern is discovering what became of her mother, who disappeared when Abby was a baby.

"Glory Edim launches her Well-Read Black Girl Library with this vital anthology celebrating stories from such luminaries as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. Since founding the Well-Read Black Girl Book Club in 2015, Glory Edim's profile has skyrocketed. From her roots in a Brooklyn-based community to a massive online following, she has been heralded as the literary tastemaker for a new generation. With On Girlhood, Edim has beautifully curated a canonical...

"The Secret Lives of Church Ladies explores the raw and tender places where black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church's double standards and their own needs and passions"--

Black girls, including gender non-conforming individuals, star in this collection of sixteen stories of fantasy, science fiction, and magic.