The Bluest Eye
Winesburg, Ohio

M.C. Higgins, the Great

Discover this transcendent middle grade masterpiece about a young black boy whose quiet rural live in the Appalachian Mountains begins to change—winner of the Newbery Medal, the National Book Award, and the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award.

Mayo Cornelius Higgins sits on his gleaming, forty-foot steel pole, towering over his home on Sarah’s Mountain. Stretched before him are rolling hills and shady valleys. But behind him lie the wounds of strip mining, including a mountain of rubble that may one day fall and bury his home.

M.C. dreams of escape for himself and his family. And, one day, atop his pole, he thinks he sees it—two strangers are making their way toward Sarah’s Mountain. One has the ability to make M.C.’s mother famous. And the other has the kind of freedom that M.C. has never even considered.

More Non-Juvenile, YA Books

  • Riley's poetry captures the essence of rural American life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and his works continue to be studied and recited to this day.

  • “Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches”: That was how Nana Alba always began the stories she told her great-granddaughter Minerva—stories that have stayed with Minerva all her life. Perhaps that’s why Minerva has become a graduate student focused on the history of horror literature and is researching the life of Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure author of macabre tales. In the course of assembling her thesis, Minerva uncovers information that reveals that Tremblay’s most famous novel, The Vanishing, was inspired by a true story: Decades earlier, during the Great Depression, Tremblay attended the same university where [...]

  • In this affecting narrative, a defining masterpiece by the "dean of Western writers" (The New York Times), Wallace Stegner portrays more than three decades in the life of the Mason family as they struggle to survive during the lean years of the early twentieth century.

  • The Blacker the Berry (1929), Wallace Thurman’s debut novel, broke new ground as an exploration of issues of “colorism,” intra-racial prejudice, and internalized racism in African American life.