Lynne Thigpen

The story of one African American family fighting to stay together and strong in the face of brutal racist attacks, illness, poverty, and betrayal in the Deep South of the 1930s.

"The time is 2025. The place is California, where small walled communities must protect themselves from hordes of desperate scavengers and roaming bands of people addicted to a drug that activates an orgasmic desire to burn, rape, and murder. When one small community is overrun, Lauren Olamina, an 18 year old black woman with the hereditary train of 'hyperempathy' -- which causes her to feel others' pain as her own -- sets off on foot along the dangerous...

Elizabeth and her brother live on a farm for a summer-and learn a whole new way of living and dreaming Elizabeth likes to invent stories. When she travels to her uncle's farm for a summer, she starts by making up new names for herself and her younger brother: "Geeder" and "Toeboy." As "Geeder" explores the farm on her own and with her brother, she encounters mysteries that capture her imagination, among them a tall, proud woman who looks just like...

Jamaica doesn't like wearing her brother's old hand-me-down boots to school. She's happy when the tiny hole in the toe gets bigger. Now her mother will have to take her shopping for new boots. She wants to buy some beautiful fuzzy pink ones like her friend Brianna's, but Brianna might think she's copying. So she picks out a pair of fancy cowboy boots. When Brianna tells Jamaica that cowboy boots aren't "in," Jamaica tells Brianna that her boots are...

To Be a Slave stands apart from other historical accounts of slavery in one extraordinary way: it is told by the slaves themselves. Their stories will tell you what it felt like to be a slave in the United States-to wear shackles on your ankles, to feel whips lashing your back, and to work under the cruelest conditions. From African villages to Georgian auction blocks, from plantation fields to abolitionist hideaways, To Be a Slave brings one of the...