with Halloween 🎃 creeping up on us so quickly, our first October #AddedToTheLibrary this month is horror themed 💀👻🩸📖
Bolstering a collection of horror stories highlighting a new generation of black authors, “The Black Girl Survives In This One” x @literarydesiree & @sj_fennell promises folktales, monsters, and so much more with black girls at the center as the heroines and survivors ✨
This book will be the first book of our #BookOfTheMonth /#AddedToTheLibrary segment where we will be writing a reader review.
Subscribe to be the first to read the review later this month ✨
September’s #BookOfTheMonth is a new read from Dr. Tererai Trent 📚
Synopsis:
“The Awakened Woman: A Guide for Remembering & Igniting Your Sacred Dreams is an accessible, intimate, and evocative guide that teaches nine essential lessons to encourage all women to reexamine their dreams and uncover the power hidden within them—power that can recreate our world for the better.”
We decided recently that instead of a #BookOfTheMonth every month , we’re going to switch & up and do an #AddedToTheLibrary collection 📚
Last week (feeling inspired x @bridgertonnetflix) we added a hardcover gold trimmed copy of Jane Austen’s classic romance novel Pride & Prejudice 📕 to our library.
The best way to kick off summer is with a blooming romance 🌻
“When Elizabeth Bennet meets Fitzwilliam Darcy for the first time at a ball, she writes him off as an arrogant and obnoxious man. He not only acts like an insufferable snob, but she also overhears him rejecting the very idea of asking her for a dance! As life pits them against each other again and again, Darcy begins to fall for Elizabeth’s wit and intelligence and Elizabeth begins to question her feelings about Darcy. But when Darcy saves her youngest sister Lydia from a scandal, Elizabeth starts to wonder if her pride has prejudiced her opinion of Darcy. Through this tale about two warring hearts, Jane Austen weaves a witty satire about life in eighteenth century England.”
This month’s book of the month is in honor of women’s history month, and of course, black history. I was watching the movie, Harriet, about Harriet Tubman, and was inspired by Harriet & Marie Buchanan’s storyline. Although Marie Buchanan, played by Janelle Monáe, was a fictional character it got me thinking about the stories of the women who escaped slavery, as well as, those who assisted the women who had escaped from slavery by introducing them to new life in the North.
The author Karen Cook Bell is a Professor of History and the Wilson H. Elkins Endowed Professor at Bowie State University. Her areas of specialization include slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and women’s history.
Her non-fictional book “Running From Bondage” mirrors the work of William Still, who in the movie Harriet & in real life, collected slave stories and records of those searching for freedom on the Underground Railroad during & after The Revolutionary War. Karen’s work focuses specifically on the stories of the women during this time.
Synopsis:
“Running from Bondage tells the compelling stories of enslaved women, who comprised one-third of all runaways, and the ways in which they fled or attempted to flee bondage during and after the Revolutionary War. Karen Cook Bell’s enlightening and original contribution to the study of slave resistance in eighteenth-century America explores the individual and collective lives of these women and girls of diverse circumstances, while also providing details about what led them to escape. She demonstrates that there were in fact two wars being waged during the Revolutionary Era: a political revolution for independence from Great Britain and a social revolution for emancipation and equality in which Black women played an active role. Running from Bondage broadens and complicates how we study and teach this momentous event, one that emphasizes the chances taken by these ‘Black founding mothers’ and the important contributions they made to the cause of liberty.”
Queendom Entertainment 