Curled Up With a Good Book and a Cup of Tea

Eighteen-year-old Layken has been through the toughest time of her life.  After the sudden passing of her father, she’s had to move across the country with her mother and nine-year-old brother.  She’s not happy to be in a new town where she knows no one, but she knows that she has to be the rock for her family.  She’s just not sure how she’ll hold it all together. Then she meets Will Cooper, her 21-year-old neighbour who is cute, intriguing, and more than interested in her.  They can’t fight the connection they immediately make and after Will introduces her to the world of slam poetry, Layken begins to think that the move may not be so bad. Until they make a discovery that quickly puts an end to their relationship.  But they still have to see each other on a daily basis which both Layken and Will find difficult to do.  And when Layken receives devastating news, it becomes almost impossible to stay away from each other. Slammed is the first b...

Who Should Read It: Everyone. Raised in both South Carolina and New York, Jacqueline Woodson grew up feeling like each place was both home and not quite home at the same time.  Living in both the South and the North in the 1960’s and 1970’s Civil Rights era, it seemed as though she lived two different lives.  In Brown Girl Dreaming , the National Book Award winner shares the moving story of her childhood, what life was like for an African American girl growing up in the Civil Rights movement in both two very different places.   But this book is much more than your standard memoir.  Woodson writes in a beautiful and touching manner, sharing her childhood through incredible free verse.  The book originally is aimed at a middle grade audience but it will move and touch readers of every age.   Jacqueline was born in Ohio but at a young age moved with her siblings to live in her mother’s hometown in South Carolina.  As a young teenager sh...

During the 1920's and 1930's a cultural explosion occurred in the African-American community of Harlem.  Novels, plays, music and poetry all emerged out of the Harlem Renaissance documenting the plight of Black Americans and redefining Black identity.  One of the most famous names to come out of this movement is Langston Hughes. James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in 1902, an African American descended from relationships between slave owners and slaves.  He grew up in an educated, politically inclined family that instilled in him a strong sense of racial pride and activism.  In his twenties he began to write poetry that expressed the attitudes and difficulties of Blacks in America.  He wrote to uplift his fellow people and to preserve their experiences.   Selected Poems of Langston Hughes is a collection of poems that Hughes himself felt were important for preservation and includes unpublished material.  First published in 1959, this col...