Featured Title
Title:
Author:
Calvin Alexander Ramsey
Summary:
After a storm devastates the farm his parents have been renting, Junior moves with his family to Roxboro, North Carolina. The year is 1959, and the nine-year-old boy has to navigate the realities of the segregated South while adjusting to life in town. Instead of farming, his father works at the lumberyard, and his mother takes in laundry from the white people in town. Junior meets new friends who have a TV—and their own books! These new friends offer to take Junior to the library, and he’s surprised to discover that in a clearing in the forest, there’s a log cabin that houses a library for Black residents. The library in the woods feels magical, giving Junior a sense of possibility and community. The books he checks out also help him uncover a secret he never knew about his father.
This fictional account is based on a real-life library author Calvin Alexander Ramsey frequented as a child. Ramsey’s heartfelt text, accompanied by illustrations from award-winning artist R. Gregory Christie, celebrates family, libraries, and the resourcefulness of the Black community.
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Lerner Publishing Group creates the highest-quality nonfiction and fiction content for children and young adults in a variety of subjects and formats. Based in Minneapolis since its founding in 1959, Lerner Publishing Group is one of the nation’s largest independent children’s book publishers with sixteen imprints: Lerner Publications, Millbrook Press™, Carolrhoda Books®, Carolrhoda Lab®, Graphic Universe™, Gecko Press, Soaring Kite Books, Twenty-First Century Books™, Zest Books™, Darby Creek™, Kar-Ben Publishing®, Sundance Newbridge, LernerClassroom™, ediciones Lerner, First Avenue Editions™, and Lerner Digital™. In addition, Lerner Publisher Services sells and distributes high-quality children’s books from renowned publishing partners through all major sales channels. Lerner Publisher Services also provides production and eBook conversion services for publisher clients to help them create hardcover, paperback, and digital format books.