- Catalog Home
- » My Account
- » List
21) Yonder: a novel
Author
Description
"The Water Dancer meets The Prophets in this spare, gripping, and beautifully rendered novel exploring love and friendship among a group of enslaved Black strivers in the mid-nineteenth century. They call themselves the Stolen. Their owners call them captives. They are taught their captors' tongues and their beliefs but they have a language and rituals all their own. In a world that would be allegorical if it weren't saturated in harsh truths, Cato...
22) Cosmogramma
Author
On Shelf
Villa Park Public Library - Sci-Fi/Fantasy
SF NEWLAND, C.
1 available
SF NEWLAND, C.
1 available
Description
"In his exquisite first collection of speculative fiction, Courttia Newland envisages an alternate future as lived by the African diaspora. Kill parties roam the streets of a post-apocalyptic world; a matriarchal race of mer creatures depends on interbreeding with mortals to survive; mysterious seeds appear in cities across the world, growing into the likeness of people in their vicinity. Through transfigured bodies and impossible encounters, Newland...
Author
eBook
Description
"'We should have known the end was near.' So begins Imbolo Mbue's exquisite and devastating novel How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by a large and powerful American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean up and financial reparations to the...
Author
Series
Boyfriend project volume 2
On Shelf
Villa Park Public Library - Fiction
F ROCHON, F.
1 available
F ROCHON, F.
1 available
Description
"When it comes to personal training, Taylor Powell kicks serious butt. Unfortunately, her bills are piling up, rent is due, and the money situation is dire. Taylor needs more than the support of her new best friends, Samiah and London. She needs a miracle. And Jamar Dixon might just be it. The oh-so-fine former pro athlete wants back into the game, and he wants Taylor to train him. There's just one catch -- no one can know what they're doing. But...
25) Dead dead girls
Author
Series
Description
"The start of an exciting new historical mystery series set during the Harlem Renaissance from debut author Nekesa Afia. Harlem, 1926. Young black women like Louise Lloyd are ending up dead. Following a harrowing kidnapping ordeal when she was in her teens, Louise is doing everything she can to maintain a normal life. She's succeeding, too. She spends her days working at Maggie's Café and her nights at the Zodiac, Harlem's hottest speakeasy. Louise's...
Author
On Shelf
Villa Park Public Library - Fiction
F MORRISON, T.
1 available
F MORRISON, T.
1 available
eBook
Description
In this 1983 short story about race and the relationships that shape us through life, Twyla and Roberta, friends since childhood who are seemingly at opposite ends of every problem as they grow older, cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them.
Twyla and Roberta have known each other since they were eight years old, roommates in the St. Bonaventure shelter. After losing touch, they meet several times by accident. Seemingly...
27) Dead of winter
Author
Series
August Snow novels volume 3
Formats:
Description
"Authentico Foods Inc. has been a part of Detroit's Mexican town for over thirty years, grown from a home kitchen business to a city-block-long facility that supplies Mexican tortillas to restaurants throughout the Midwest. Detroit ex-cop and Mexican town native August Snow has been invited for a business meeting at Authentico Foods. Its owner, Ronaldo Ochoa, is dying, and is being blackmailed into selling the company to an anonymous entity. Worried...
Author
Formats:
Description
"Inspired by Mrs. Dalloway and Sula, The Days of Afrekete is a tender, surprising novel about two Philadelphia women at midlife who rediscover themselves-and perhaps each other"--
29) Filthy animals
Author
Formats:
On Shelf
Villa Park Public Library - Fiction
F TAYLOR, B.
1 available
F TAYLOR, B.
1 available
Description
"In the series of linked stories at the heart of Filthy Animals, set among young creatives in the American midwest, a young man treads delicate emotional waters as he navigates a series of sexually fraught encounters with two dancers in an open relationship, forcing him to weigh his vulnerabilities against his loneliness. In other stories, a young woman battles with the cancers draining her body and her family; menacing undercurrents among a group...
Author
On Shelf
Villa Park Public Library - Fiction
F WALTON, D.
1 available
F WALTON, D.
1 available
Description
"Opal is a fiercely independent young woman pushing against the grain in her style and attitude, Afro-punk before that term existed. Coming of age in Detroit, she can't imagine settling for a 9-to-5 job--despite her unusual looks, Opal believes she can be a star. So when the aspiring British singer/songwriter Neville Charles discovers her at a bar's amateur night, she takes him up on his offer to make rock music together for the fledgling Rivington...
31) The freedom race
Author
Series
Dreambird chronicles volume 1
Formats:
eAudiobook
Description
"The Freedom Race, Lucinda Roy's explosive first foray into speculative fiction, is a poignant blend of subjugation, resistance, and hope. In the aftermath of a cataclysmic civil war known as the Sequel, ideological divisions among the states have hardened. In the Homestead Territories, an alliance of plantation-inspired holdings, Black labor is imported from the Cradle, and Biracial "Muleseeds" are bred. Raised in captivity on Planting 437, kitchen-seed...
32) A game of cones
Author
Series
Ice cream parlor mysteries volume 2
Formats:
On Shelf
Villa Park Public Library - Mystery
M COLLETTE, A.
1 available
M COLLETTE, A.
1 available
Description
"In this charming mystery series set in an ice cream shop, no case is too cold to crack! Bronwyn Crewse is delighted that Crewse Creamery, the ice cream shop her family has owned for decades, is restored to its former glory and serving sweet frozen treats to happy customers in the picturesque small town of Chagrin Falls, Ohio. But when a big city developer comes to town intent on building a mall, a killer with a frozen heart takes him out. After literally...
Author
Formats:
On Shelf
Villa Park Public Library - Mystery
M HOLLOWAY, K.
1 available
M HOLLOWAY, K.
1 available
Description
"A kidnapping tests the mettle, resourcefulness, and intuition of Harlem's first "colored" policeman in this mystery, set during New York's Harlem Renaissance. The story references the infamous Lindbergh baby kidnapping"--
34) Assembly
Author
Formats:
Description
"The narrator of Assembly is a black British woman. She is preparing to attend a lavish garden party at her boyfriend's family estate, set deep in the English countryside. At the same time, she is considering the carefully assembled pieces of herself. As the minutes tick down and the future beckons, she can't escape the question: is it time to take it all apart? Assembly is a story about the stories we live within--those of race and class, safety...
35) Harlem shuffle
Author
Series
Harlem trilogy (Colson Whitehead) volume 1
eAudiobook
eBook
Description
""Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked ..." To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably-priced furniture, making a life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver's Row don't approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it's still home. Few people know he descends from...
36) Honey girl
Author
On Shelf
Villa Park Public Library - Fiction
F ROGERS, M.
1 available
F ROGERS, M.
1 available
eAudiobook
eBook
Description
After completing her Ph.D. in astronomy, a young, straightlaced, Type A personality black woman goes on a girls' weekend to Vegas to celebrate and gets drunkenly married to a woman whose name she doesn't even know.
With her newly completed PhD in astronomy in hand, 28-year-old Grace Porter goes on a girls' trip to Vegas to celebrate. She is not the kind of person who goes to Vegas and gets drunkenly married to a woman whose name she doesn't know......
Author
On Shelf
Villa Park Public Library - Fiction
F JACKSON, K.
1 available
F JACKSON, K.
1 available
Description
"Bethany Lu Carlisle is devastated when the tabloids report actor Keanu Reeves is about to tie the knot. What?! How could the world's perfect boyfriend and forever bachelor, Keanu not realize that making a move like this could potentially be devastating to the equilibrium of...well...everything! Not to mention he's never come face to face with the person who could potentially be his true soulmate -- her. Desperate to convince Keanu to call off the...
Author
eAudiobook
Description
"A remarkable, sweeping historical novel based on the incredible true life story of Dorothy Kirwan Thomas, a free woman of color who rose from slavery to become one of the wealthiest and most powerful landowners in the colonial West Indies. Born into slavery on the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat, Doll bought her freedom—and that of her sister and her mother—from her Irish planter father and built a legacy of wealth and power as an entrepreneur,...
Author
eAudiobook
eBook
Description
"It's 2008, and the rise of Barack Obama ushers in a new kind of hope. In Chicago, Ruth Tuttle, an Ivy-League educated black engineer, is married to a kind and successful man. He's eager to start a family, but Ruth is uncertain. She has never gotten over the baby she gave birth to, and abandoned, when she was a teenager. She had promised her family she'd never look back, but Ruth knows that to move forward, she must make peace with the past. Returning...
40) Blood grove
Author
Series
Easy Rawlins mysteries volume 15
Description
Ezekiel 'Easy' Porterhouse Rawlins is an unlicensed private investigator turned hard-boiled detective always willing to do what it takes to get things done in the racially charged, dark underbelly of Los Angeles. But when Easy is approached by a shell-shocked Vietnam War veteran, a young white man who claims to have gotten into a fight protecting a white woman from a black man, he knows he shouldn't take the case. Though he sees nothing but trouble...