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If You Like...To Kill a Mockingbird
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We Are All Welcome Here
by Elizabeth Berg
Stricken by polio, Paige Dunn, a woman of remarkable free spirit, beauty, and intelligence, continues to raise her daughter, Diana, with the help of her caretaker Peacie, in novel about the power of love and the resilience of the human spirit, set against the backdrop of Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1964.
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My Last Days as Roy Rogers
by Pat Cunningham Devoto
Growing up in Alabama in the 1950s, two inseparable ten-year-old girls, one black and one white, discover the theft of money meant for polio victims and expose a racial injustice in the process.
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The Queen of Palmyra
by Minrose Gwin
As she spends more and more time in the home of her grandparents' maid, Zenie, in the segregated South of the 1960s, Florence Forrest develops a sense for how race truly divides her town, but nothing prepares her for the tragedy that occurs after Zenie’s niece, a vibrant college student, comes to stay for the summer.
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Mudbound
by Hillary Jordan
It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has come home with the shine of a war hero. But no matter his bravery in defense of his country, he is still considered less than a man in the Jim Crow South. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion. The men and women of each family relate their versions of events and we are drawn into their lives as they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale.
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The Bottoms
by Joe R. Lansdale
East Texas in the early thirties was in the throes of the Depression, but for young Harry Collins and little sister Tom—for Thomasina—it is a time of adventure. The woods are filled with all the excitement and mystery two curious youngsters need, but when Harry and Tom find the mutilated, decomposing body of a young black woman on a creek bank in the area called the Bottoms, profound changes come to the Collins family. As the town constable, Harry and Tom’s father, Jacob, tries to do his duty, he runs flush up against the virulent racism of the times.
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Light From a Distant Star
by Mary McGarry Morris
Caring for her shy younger brother while her mother returns to work in the wake of her father's failing business and her sister's search for her birth father, 13-year-old Nellie encounters three strangers including a junkyard worker, a New York City thief and a young stripper before witnessing a shocking act of violence.
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The Persia Café
by Melany Neilson
The disappearance of a black boy in a small Mississippi town plunges young Fannie, a girl who dreams of cooking her way to a better life, into her town's own heart of darkness.
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Wingshooters
by Nina Revoyr
Michelle LeBeau and her white-Japanese family are forever changed when a black family moves into her all-white town in 1974.
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Clover
by Dori Sanders
After her father dies within hours of being married to a white woman, a ten-year-old black girl learns with her new mother to overcome grief and to adjust to a new place in their rural black South Carolina community.
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The Optimist's Daughter
by Eudora Welty
Laurel Hand is forced to face her Southern past when she returns to Mississippi for her father's funeral.
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Winter's Bone
by Daniel Woodrell
Reaching her sixteenth year in the harsh Ozarks while caring for her poverty-stricken family, Ree Dolly learns that they will lose their house unless her bail-skipping father can be found and made to appear at an upcoming court date.
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