KDL Recommends

The New South is still beholden to its past, especially in St. Tammany Parish, where justice is slow for an old black man who was attacked by high school kids and lies in a coma waiting to die.

The lives of fifty-four-year-old concierge Rene Michel and extremely bright, suicidal twelve-year-old Paloma Josse are transformed by the arrival of a new tenant, Kakuro Ozu.

In a small Texas town in 1966, 13-year-old Jim meets Sam, who gradually becomes a father figure to the boy. Together they form a remarkable relationship, discussing among other things, the death of Jim’s alcoholic father, Sam’s years playing baseball in the Negro Leagues, & the racial tension in their community.

Luther T. Farrell’s mother, a.k.a. “The Sarge” milked the system to build an empire of slum housing and group homes in Flint, MI. Luther’s just one of the many people trapped in the Sarge’s Evil Empire—but he’s about to bust out!

Against the last “polio summer” of 1954, in Alabama, with closed swimming pools and movie theaters and fear and germs in the air, 8-year-old narrator Tabitha and her friends build a hideout and christen it Fort Polio. Then there is the unspoken issue of racism….that underlies everything “Tab” sees.

When artifacts from Japanese families sent to internment camps during World War II are uncovered during renovations at a Seattle hotel, Henry Lee embarks on a quest that leads to memories of growing up Chinese in a city rife with anti-Japanese sentiment.

A frustrated teacher in a small Cajun community, whose education is being underutilized, finds his own purpose in helping bring meaning to the last days of a young man due to be executed. In teaching one person to die with dignity, he redeems himself.

Reviled in her German village home where her only friends are a fellow outcast and an elderly storyteller, eleven-year-old Pia investigates the disappearances of three local girls whom she believes are tied to unsolved missing persons cases from decades earlier.

Brooklyn, friendship between an 11-year-old Irish Catholic boy and an elderly Jewish rabbi might seem as unlikely as well as snow in August. But the relationship between young Devlin and Rabbi Judah Hirsch is only one of the many miracles large and small contained in this novel.

Living w/an eccentric great-aunt after her mentally unbalanced mother’s accidental death, 12 year-old CeeCee is quickly surrounded by the strong women and cultural elements of her new Savannah community.

Traces the unlikely friendship of a wealthy Afghan youth and a servant’s son, in a tale that spans the final days of Afghanistan’s monarchy through the atrocities of the present day.

In rural South Carolina, in 1964, a young girl is given a home by three black, beekeeping sisters. As she enters their mesmerizing secret world of bees and honey, she discovers a place where she can find the single thing her heart longs for most.

In 1929, Boyd Calvin, a 28-year-old shell-shocked World War I veteran stops by his ex-wife’s home and finds her dead in a pool of blood—so he’s now on the run. He lands in a jail cell next to George, a black man who’s been unjustly jailed. They become fugitives together and, with the help of George, Boyd briefly enters the world of early-20th-century black America.

In 1917 Alabama, 12 year-old Dit hopes the new postmaster will have a son his age, but instead he meets Emma, who is black, and their friendship challenges accepted ways of thinking and leads them to save a condemned man.

Possessing encyclopedia-like intelligence, unusual zookeeper’s son Pi Patel sets sail for America, but when the ship sinks, he escapes on a life boat and is lost at sea with a dwindling number of animals until only he and a hungry Bengal tiger remain.

Written in remembrance of his Polish-born, Southern-raised Jewish mother-who married a black man and raised twelve children, all of whom completed college-The Color of Water is a classic of the memoir genre, a testament to love, and a truly American story.

Three children lost their innocence—as the sweltering summer heat bears down on the hottest day in 1935—and their lives are changed forever.

Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of “To Kill a Mockingbird” is a lively appreciation of the many ways in which the novel has made—and continues to make—a difference to generations of readers.

“To the tables I hauled more fried chicken.’n baked ham ’n delicate corn pudding,” says Fannie Leary, the narrator of the story, as she describes her work cooking and serving her neighbors. Like the café’s name, the narrative serves up old-fashioned fare, and lots of it, lovingly prepared in Persia, Miss., in the summer of 1962 and depicting the death throes of the “Jim Crow South.”

A vivid, funny, and viscerally powerful memoir about childhood, assimilation, food, and growing up in the 1980s.

During the early days of the Civil War, the Pruitt family takes in two mysterious young ladies who have fled New Orleans to come north to Illinois.

Book 2 of Shenandoah Sisters. Mayme and Katie, from entirely different worlds, have been thrown together in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War. Just teenagers, they are left to survive only by their own wits and shared experiences.

On the sixtieth anniversary of the 1942 roundup of Jews by the French police in the Vel d’Hiv section of Paris, American journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article on this dark episode during World War II and embarks on investigation that leads her to long-hidden family secrets and to the ordeal of Sarah, a young girl caught up in the raid.

Charismatic African-American professor Martin Matheson polarizes students and the larger Jackson, Miss., community with his incendiary lectures about lynching and other atrocities inflicted by local whites upon local blacks at the height of the struggle for civil rights. Blood evidence links Matheson to the killing of unrepentant racist Earvin Cooper and being tried not for inciting murder (as seems likely) but for the murder itself.

Set during the nascent civil rights movement in Jackson, Miss., where black women were trusted to raise white children but not to polish the household silver, the author focuses on the fascinating and complex relationships between the vastly different members of a household—on many levels.

An 8-year-old German-Irish girl growing up in California who, as the youngest of six in an abusive and alcoholic family, informally adopts Sunny Yamagata and her Japanese-American family as her own in the late 1930s. After losing touch for 23 years, they meet again in Mississippi in the racially torn 1960s, with their own inner conflicts about race and forgiveness.

Twin brothers born from a secret love affair between an Indian nun and a British surgeon in Addis Ababa, Marion and Shiva Stone come of age in an Ethiopia on the brink of revolution, where their love for the same woman drives them apart.

A true-life novel about Lily, the author’s grandmother who at age 6 helped her father break horses, at age 15 left home to teach in a frontier town, and later as a wife and mother, run a vast ranch in Arizona where she survived tornadoes, droughts, floods, and the Great Depression—but despite a life of hardscrabble drudgery still remains a woman of indomitable spirit.