How remiss of me not to mention the classics by Mildred Taylor:
1. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
2. Let The Circle Be Unbroken
3. The Road to Memphis (every time I read this book, I cry like a baby).
You have to read IMANI ALL MINE by Connie Rose Porter. One of my Caucasian students read this book my first year teaching. She told me it was a good book. THAT was an understatement. This book had me broke down crying like FUNERAL CRYING.
Plot Summary:
From Publishers Weekly
"The doctor say she see it every day, babies having babies." Fifteen-year-old Tasha Dawson narrates a tale of teenage motherhood in Porter's second adult novel (after All-Bright Court). Balancing her honor-roll grades with the perils of surviving inner-city Buffalo, N.Y., Tasha gives birth to Imani?a child conceived in violence and given a name that means "faith." . The young mother expresses a powerful, protective love for her daughter even as she herself negotiates her existence among drug dealers and bigoted authorities and explores her own adolescent sexuality. She struggles to understand her mother's new relationship with a white man; her own desires, shame and pride; and the nature of a God who is both merciless and loved. Just when Tasha appears to have found a place for herself with Imani and in school, her world is devastated by a flash of injustice that changes her life forever. Porter spins the tale in a series of flashbacks, telling Tasha's story in a nonlinear fashion and with a bold dialect, mirroring the survival strategies of indirection that Tasha employs in her complex navigation of young adulthood, motherhood and urban life. Porter is also known as a young-adult fiction writer (the Addy books in the American Girls series), and at times this novel slips uncomfortably into YA simplicity, especially in its resolutely uplifting final scenes, which offer an almost cloyingly spiritual happy ending to Tasha's complicated, earthbound story. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
LOL, I forgot I reviewed this book on Amazon. . .
I gave it 5 stars, but this is what I wrote in 2001: I wholeheartedly agree with the reviewer who said that Oprah needs to find this book. I was totally blown away by the ending and was hit hard by my emotions. I loved Tasha's voice and the intelligence and reality that she bought with this novel. I only wish she could have told her mother about the rape.
Trust me, if you have not read this book, you need to.
Threaded Mode
