The Long Song

by Andrea Levy

A formerly enslaved woman tells her story her own way.

$26 MSRP
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July is an enslaved woman on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the final years before emancipation. She narrates her own story with defiant wit — interrupting herself, arguing with her son who is trying to write her memoir, insisting on her own version of events. Levy uses this formal device to dispatch from inside the experience of enslavement while refusing to let the institution be the only thing that defines her narrator. The most formally inventive slavery narrative on this shelf. July demands to be more than her suffering and the novel honors that demand completely.

Same pattern, different era

Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.

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A Black Women’s History of the United States

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A People’s History of the United States

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For the family bookshelf

Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.

Sister Outsider

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Poetry with teeth and a megaphone.

✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST

Freedom Dreams

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Radical hope as resistance strategy.

✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST

Change Sings

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Kids, courage, and the sound of change.

✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST

Greta and the Giants

Zoë Tucker

A tiny voice takes on giants.

✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST