Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Adult
Incarcerated people fight to the death on national television for a shot at freedom. Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are partners and rivals inside a spectacle that sells Black pain as entertainment — with footnotes that will not let you watch from the couch.
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Incarceration as prime-time sport. Blackness, spectacle, and the state’s hunger, with footnotes that are part of the argument, not decoration.
Adult. Extreme violence. If you need the brutality offstage, this is not the one.
What would you have to believe about a person to buy a ticket?
Read the footnotes. Skipping them is how the audience in the book watches.
Two titles that deepen the same conversation.
Adult
AmericanahChimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Ifemelu leaves military-ruled Nigeria for the United States and learns, for the first time, what it means to be Black in America. Obinze, shut out after 9/11, builds an undocumented life in London. Hair, blogs, class, and the difference between becoming American and staying yourself.
Adult
JamesPercival Everett
A reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view. When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold away from his wife and daughter, he runs — and the raft journey down the Mississippi becomes his story of language, literacy, and who gets to be the narrator.
Adult
KindredOctavia E. Butler
On her twenty-sixth birthday, Dana is pulled from 1976 California to an antebellum Maryland plantation to save a drowning white boy — the ancestor she must keep alive so she can be born. Time travel makes slavery a present-tense problem she cannot theorize from a safe distance.
Ages 8–12
A Good Kind of TroubleLisa Moore Ramée
From debut author Lisa Moore Ramée comes this funny and big-hearted debut middle grade novel about friendship, family, and standing up for what’s right, perfect for fans of Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give and the novels of Renée Watson ...
Ages 3–8
A Kids Book About RacismJelani Memory
This is one conversation that's never too early to start, and this book was written to be an introduction for kids on the topic.
Young adult
All American BoysJason Reynolds & Brendan Kiely
When sixteen-year-old Rashad is mistakenly accused of stealing, classmate Quinn witnesses his brutal beating at the hands of a police officer who happens to be the older brother of his best friend.
Ages 3–8
An American StoryKwame Alexander
This is the story of American slavery, a story that needs to be told and understood by all of us. A testament to the resilience of the African American community, this book honors what has been and envisions what is to be.
Ages 3–8
Antiracist BabyIbram X. Kendi
From the National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist comes a new full-sized picture book that empowers parents and children to uproot racism in our society and in ourselves, now with added ...
