Showing results by narrator "SiSi Johnson" in All Categories

After months of quarantine while a mysterious virus destroyed most of her family and her small island community, Kaelyn wants just a little good news when the first boat arrives from the mainland. But although she's overjoyed to see her best friend Leo again, the tidings he brings are nothing to celebrate. The virus has devastated the mainland as well, and they need help just as badly as the islanders do.

It’s been 925 summers since the Jemen introduced zyme, a bioluminescent algae, into the world’s ocean and unwittingly triggered an Ice Age that has consumed most of the planet. All but a handful of Jemen flew to the stars, but before they left, they recreated several extinct species that had thrived in the last Ice Age. After almost a thousand summers, the archaic hominins that struggle along the edges of massive glaciers are dwindling. All they have to save them is a dying quantum computer called Quancee and her student, a Denisovan man named Lynx.

Violet is a smart, funny, brown-eyed, brown-haired girl in a family of blonds. Her mom is white, and her dad, who died before she was born, was black. She attends a mostly white school where she sometimes feels like a brown leaf on a pile of snow. She's tired of people asking if she's adopted. Now that Violet's 11, she decides it's time to learn about her African American heritage. And despite getting off to a rocky start trying to reclaim her dad's side of the family, she can feel her confidence growing as the puzzle pieces of her life finally start coming together.

A must-have anthology of the leading Black women and femmes shaping today’s food and hospitality landscape—from farm to table and beyond—chronicling their passions and motivations, lessons learned and hard-won wisdom, personal recipes, and more.

Nine long months after being shut out of the pillow-fort network for good, Maggie and Abby finally have a whole new mission to focus on - and this one starts with a return to the infamous Camp Cantaloupe. Abby needs this trip after a year of big, big changes back at home. But Abby knows that Maggie will never relax until they've solved the lingering puzzle left over from last summer: the mystery of the trap door in Camp Cantaloupe’s historic Shipwreck Treehouse.

A lush, glittering short story collection exploring female obsession and desire by an award-winning author Roxane Gay calls "a consummate storyteller." From Kentucky to the California desert, these 42 short stories - ranging from the '80s and '90s to present day - expose the hearts of girls and women in moments of obsessive desire and fantasy, wildness and bad behavior, brokenness and fearlessness, and more.

Patricia C. McKissack’s books have received numerous awards, including the Coretta Scott King, Newbery Honor, and the Caldecott Medal. She teams up with storyteller Onawumi Jean Moss for this suspenseful, but not too scary, story taken from Gullah folklore. Left home alone because of a stomachache, Precious cleverly outwits the Boo Hag by singing her own wonderful little song.

A crowded new school and a crazy class schedule is enough to make Izzy feel dizzy. It may be the first day of middle school, but as long as her best friends Allie Einstein and Charlie Darwin are by her side, Izzy knows it'll all be okay. However, first-day jitters take an icy turn when Izzy's old pal Marie Curie comes back to town. Instead of a warm welcome, Marie gives her former pal the cold shoulder. The problems pile up when the school's air-conditioning goes on the fritz and the temperature suddenly drops to near freezing.

Jack Lee is a white lawyer from Freeman County, Virginia, who has never done anything to push back against racism, until he decides to represent Jerome Washington, a Black man charged with killing an elderly and wealthy white couple. Doubting his decision, Lee fears that his legal skills may not be enough to prevail in a case where the odds are already stacked against both him and his client. And he quickly finds himself out of his depth when he realizes that what is at stake is far greater than the outcome of a murder trial.

What's a Brooklyn girl to do when her best friend is away for the whole summer? Aimless and unhappy with her new foster mother, Kate falls into the hands of a stylish It Chick who whips her into fashionable shape. Armed with new confidence and a game plan to get her man, Kate quickly falls under her new bestie's bad influence. Told through Kate's witty, fearless point of view, this two-in-one edition of Hot Girl and Bad Boy present powerful stories from an important voice in young-adult fiction.

Frankie Sparks can't wait to enter the town-wide sled design contest. With the help of a team, she must design and build a sled using only cardboard and duct tape. And there are PRIZES!

In All I Want Is Everything, Kendra Michelle Thomas boasts pipes that bring tears to the eyes, but a musical career seems a million miles away when your family life is in tatters. With an absentee father, alcoholic mother, and a trip to foster care, Kendra might have given up on her dreams - but there's a spark inside her that just won't die.

During the hardships of obtaining emancipation, two couples shared one home in Illinois. Residing with them was a young Black girl named Polly Crocket. But after five years, Polly, along with the two couples, were abducted, placed into a canoe, and taken down South where they became slaves. Polly was then bought by a prior who, after a year, faced setbacks that required him to sell all he owned, including Polly.

Zoe Reindeer has a very big imagination, but in real life she considers herself "just Zoe" - not measuring up to her too-perfect older sister and her smarty-pants little brother. Truthfully, though, she'd rather just blend in with the plants at the family business, Doc Reindeer's Exotic Plant Wonderland. That is until a tall astronomer from Madagascar comes into the nursery looking for a Baobab tree and starts a ball rolling that makes Zoe long for real adventures, not just imaginary ones.

When Marisol sets out to create a sky for the class mural she discovers the blue missing from her paints. This story celebrates the creative process and what it means to be an artist.

Best-selling author Benilde Little is acclaimed for her funny and compassionate novels. Her Good Hair was selected as one of the 10 best books of 1996 by the Los Angeles Times. In Who Does She Think She Is? she weaves a rich tale of three generations of women. Twenty-six-year-old Aisha is about to wed a wealthy white man. But when she has second thoughts, she, her mother, and her grandmother confront the universal truths that tie lovers and families together.

It's the day before the big parade. Alta can think about only one thing: Wilma Rudolph, three-time Olympic gold medalist. She'll be riding on a float tomorrow. See, Alta is the quickest kid in Clarksville, Tennessee, just like Wilma once was. It doesn't matter that Alta's shoes have holes because Wilma came from hard times, too. But what happens when a new girl with shiny new shoes comes along and challenges Alta to a race? Will she still be the quickest kid?

Ever since she was little, Leah Vernon was told what to believe and how to act. There wasn’t any room for imperfection. "Good" Muslim girls listened more than they spoke. They didn’t have a missing father or a mother with a mental disability. They didn’t have fat bodies or grow up wishing they could be like the white characters they saw on TV. They didn’t have husbands who abused and cheated on them. They certainly didn’t have secret abortions.

Culture shock knocks city girl Agnes "Nes" Murphy-Pujols off-kilter when she's transplanted mid-senior year from Brooklyn to a small Southern town after her mother's relationship with a coworker self-destructs. On top of the move, Nes is nursing a broken heart and severe homesickness, so her plan is simple: keep her head down, graduate, and get out. Too bad that flies out the window on day one, when she opens her smart mouth and pits herself against the school's reigning belle and the principal. Her rebellious streak attracts the attention of local golden boy Doyle Rahn.

It's time for the annual school talent show, and Frankie is excited to audition with her magic act! She wants to be just like her idol, Adelaide Herrmann, Queen of Magic. But on the day of the audition, Frankie's best friend and Magician's Assistant, Maya, gets a big, scary case of stage fright! How can Maya be Frankie's helper on stage if she can't bring herself to speak in front of their audience? It's up to Frankie Sparks to invent just the perfect thing to help her best friend cope with the spotlight!