Helen Plum Library

A heartbreaking and powerful novel about racism and social justice as fourteen-year-old Ayo has to decide whether to take on her mother's activist role when her mom is shot by police. As she tries to find answers, Ayo looks to the wisdom of her ancestors and her Harlem community for guidance. Ayo's mother founded the biggest civil rights movement to hit New York City in decades. It's called 'See Us' and it tackles police brutality and racial profiling...

Old Crow Medicine Show founder and Grammy award-winning musician Ketch Secor teams up with Ashley Bryan Award-winning illustrator Higgins Bond to create this sweeping, epic Americana story about the power of music and family.

"Who needs a whistle or some shiny thing

when you've got a voice and a song that can sing!

Lorraine and her Pa Paw spend their days celebrating life with the music of the Tennessee hills.

...

"An illustrated picture book autobiography in which award-winning author Yuyi Morales tells her own immigration story"--

"A distinctive new voice: Rex Ogle's story of starting middle school on the free lunch program is timely, heartbreaking, and true. Free Lunch is the story of Rex Ogle's first semester in sixth grade. Rex and his baby brother often went hungry, wore secondhand clothes, and were short of school supplies, and Rex was on his school's free lunch program. Grounded in the immediacy of physical hunger and the humiliation of having to announce it every day...

"In the summer of 1965, Sophie's family becomes the first African Americans to move into their upper middle-class neighborhood in Los Angeles. When riots erupt in nearby Watts, she learns that life and her own place in it are a lot more complicated than they had seemed"--

Follows fourteen-year-old Zoe and her recently exonerated father as they build their new relationship and work to open a restaurant together

The compelling, poignant true stories of victims of a notorious adoption scandal—some of whom learned the truth from Lisa Wingate’s bestselling novel Before We Were Yours and were reunited with birth family members as a result of its wide reach
From the 1920s to 1950, Georgia Tann ran a black-market baby business at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis. She offered up more than 5,000 orphans tailored...

Twenty-six years have passed since the death of Jane Austen. Armed with a lock of Austen's hair as perhaps her best clue, Anne Sharp, former governess to the Austen family and Jane's close friend, has decided at least to tell her story -- a story of family intrigues, shocking secrets, forbidden loves, and maybe even murder

Twelve-year-old Kela is still mourning her mother when she finds a mermaid's comb while she and her friend are looking for sea glass on her Caribbean island; such combs have magic in them, and touching it opens a connection to the mermaid Ophidia who can grant her wish, to bring her mother back to life--but all wishes have consequences, and magic demands a price which may prove to be more painful than the loss of her mother

An Inspiring Approach to Reading From A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to Ramona the Pest to Wringer, here are 100 great books guaranteed to stir the imagination, spark conversation, and lead the way to adventure. In 100 Books for Girls to Grow On, Shireen Dodson, author of the acclaimed The Mother-Daughter Book Club, offers a selection of both new and classic titles. Each book has been handpicked because it is a joy to read, because it inspires mother-daughter...