"Every year, Haitians all over the world ring in the new year by eating a special soup, a tradition dating back to the Haitian Revolution. This year, Ti Gran is teaching Belle how to make the soup -- Freedom Soup -- just like she was taught when she was a little girl. Together, they dance and clap as they prepare the holiday feast, and Ti Gran tells Belle about the history of the soup, the history of Belle's family, and the history of Haiti, where...

In 1803, after being exposed as a girl and forced to leave her ship, Jacky Faber finds herself attending school in Boston, where, instead of learning to be a lady, she battles her snobbish classmates, roams the city in search of adventure, and learns to ride a horse.

A powerful story set in small-town Arkansas in the 1950s that illuminates the friendship surrounding the arrival of Chinese immigrants in the segregated south. Azalea is not happy about being dropped off to look after Grandmother Clark. Even if she didn't care that much about meeting the new sixth graders in her Texas hometown, those strangers seem much preferable to the ones in Paris Junction. Talk about troubled Willis DeLoach or gossipy Melinda...

First published in 1845, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is the memoir of former slave turned abolitionist. The story recounts Douglass's life from early childhood growing up in Maryland as a slave to his eventual escape to the North. Learning to read and write served him well, as he would eventually use it to document the civil injustices of slavery in 19th century America and to craft his impassioned oratories against it.