Showing results by narrator "Janina Edwards" in All Categories

A weary Chicago shop owner catches yet another kid breaking into her bakeshop. The rumor has gone around her inner-city neighborhood that she's keeping cash in a sugar jar and, however unlikely, local kids keep trying to confirm it. With the latest miscreant, she decides to take matters into her own hands.

Danielle Evans is widely acclaimed for her blisteringly smart voice and X-ray insights into complex human relationships. With The Office of Historical Corrections, Evans zooms in on particular moments and relationships in her characters’ lives in a way that allows them to speak to larger issues of race, culture, and history. She introduces us to Black and multiracial characters who are experiencing the universal confusions of lust and love, and getting walloped by grief - all while exploring how history haunts us, personally and collectively.

When Boady Sanden first receives the case of Elijah Matthews, he’s certain there’s not much he can do. Elijah, who believes himself to be a prophet, has been locked up in a psychiatric hospital for the past four years, convicted of brutally murdering the pastor of a megachurch. But as a law professor working for the Innocence Project, Boady agrees to look into Elijah’s file. When he does, he is alarmed to find threads that lead back to the death of his colleague and friend, Ben Pruitt, a man shot to death four years earlier in Boady’s own home.

Follow the adventures of Zoey and her cat, Sassafras, with this collection of books one to six in the series. Each story features a new magical animal with a problem that must be solved using science. There isn’t a set formula for each book; Zoey sometimes needs to run experiments, while other times she needs to investigate a mystery, and yet other times she needs to do research. Zoey models how to keep a science journal through her handwritten entries in each story.

It’s the summer of 1964 and three innocent men are brutally murdered for trying to help Black Mississippians secure the right to vote. Against this backdrop, twenty-one year old Violet Richards finds herself in more trouble than she’s ever been in her life. Suffering a brutal attack of her own, she kills the man responsible. But with the color of Violet’s skin, there is no way she can escape Jim Crow justice in Jackson, Mississippi. Before anyone can find the body or finger her as the killer, she decides to run. With the help of her white beau, Violet escapes.

We should have known the end was near. So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made - and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests.

Each story in the Zoey and Sassafras series features a new magical animal with a problem that must be solved using science. There isn’t a set formula for each book; Zoey sometimes needs to run experiments, while other times she needs to investigate a mystery, and yet other times she needs to do research. Zoey models how to keep a science journal through her handwritten entries in each story. Each story is complete with a glossary of the kid-friendly definitions for scientific terms used.

In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North.

Imagination: A Manifesto offers visionary examples and tactics to push beyond the constraints of what we think, and are told, is possible. This book is for anyone who is ready to take to heart Toni Morrison's instruction: "Dream a little before you think."

Layla strives and sacrifices to keep a potted plant alive in a gray, post-climate-change dystopia. For fans of Nina LaCour, this short tale asks: can hope bloom from a single seed? 

Everyone needs to love and be loved - even men. But to know love, men must be able to look at the ways that patriarchal culture keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving. In The Will to Change, bell hooks gets to the heart of the matter and shows men how to express the emotions that are a fundamental part of who they are - whatever their age, marital status, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.

There is an unaddressed Black mental health crisis in our world today. In The Unapologetic Guide to Black Mental Health, psychologist Reeda Walker offers a comprehensive guide to help African Americans combat stigma, increase awareness around mental illness, practice emotional wellness, and get the best care possible for Black people in an unequal system.

As the First Lady of Zion Hill, Rachel is not only Pastor Lester Adams's wife - she's currently his eight-months-pregnant wife, who's going toe-to-toe with Lester's onetime mistress, congregant Mary Richardson, who is also pregnant. Her baby may or may not be Lester's, but Mary's doing all she can to win sympathy and turn her fellow churchgoers against Rachel - even threatening to blackmail Pastor Adams with a paternity agreement. After all, where can an unmarried mother-to-be go but to the Lord? Rachel has a few choice answers for exactly where Mary can go....

For top blogger, Ty Alexander, the grieving process is one that she lives with day-to-day. Learning from the pain of losing her mother, Alexander connects with her listeners on a deeply emotional level in this debut audiobook. From grief counseling to sharing insightful true stories, Alexander offers comfort, reassurance, and hope in the face of sorrow. The pain of loss is universal; yet, we all grieve differently.

When her husband hears God's call to become a preacher, Rachel Jackson Adams is distressed - she grew up a preacher's daughter, and knows how difficult life under the microscope can be for a reverend's family. But hot-headed Rachel has toned down her wild ways, and for the sake of her marriage and her two children, she is now the reluctant first lady of Zion Hill, unafraid to rock the boat with her unconventional ideas for revitalizing the church.

Tenderness and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret - Alexia Arthurs navigates these tensions to extraordinary effect in her debut collection about Jamaican immigrants and their families back home. Sweeping from close-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and midwestern university towns, these 11 stories form a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life.

Dipuo, who grew up in apartheid-era Johannesburg’s largest Black township, conceived her only daughter, Malaika, on the mine dump that separated the Black city from the white one. Christo, one of the last white men drafted to police that boundary, would come to realize—one night on the same mine dump—that everything he had been taught to believe was collapsing to make way for something unprecedented. For Malaika and her peers would be born to a historic destiny: to grow up and live in a Black-led society.

Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners.

Freshly 45, Aja James knows that her life is good, complete with a loving, wealthy husband, well-adjusted children, and a beautiful home. Yet the truth is, she feels painfully unfulfilled, stuck in the present, haunted by a painful past. When a friend suggests a girls' trip to a tropical paradise, Aja hopes a change of scene will also change her perspective. On vacation, filled with fun and freedom, Aja is relieved to find her spirits lifting. But her good time also shines a light on what's troubling her: She's spent nearly her whole life taking care of everyone - except herself.

This book makes publicly available for the first time the same inclusive design process used at Google to create user-centric award-winning and profitable products. Author and Head of Product Inclusion Annie Jean-Baptiste outlines what those practices look like in industries beyond tech with fascinating case studies. Listeners will learn the key strategies and step-by-step processes for inclusive product design that limits risk and increases profitability.