When twelve-year-old Frederick "Red" Porter's father dies in 1972, his mother wants to sell their automobile repair shop and move her two sons back to Ohio, but Red is desperate to stop the sale even if it means unearthing some dark family secrets in a Virginia rife with racial tensions.

Written in blank verse, the story of Mildred Loving, an African American girl, and Richard Loving, a Caucasian boy, who challenge the Viriginia law forbidding interracial marriages in the 1950s.

"It's one thing to say you can find what people need--it's another to actually do it. It's 1932 and Sullivan Harris is on the run. An occasionally successful dowser, he promised the people of Kline, West Virginia, that he would find them water. But when wells turned up dry, he disappeared with their cash just a step or two ahead of Jeremiah Weber, who was elected to run him down.Postmistress Gainey Floyd is suspicious of Sulley's abilities when he...

In 1959 Virginia, Sarah, a black student who is one of the first to attend a newly integrated school, forces Linda, a white integration opponent's daughter, to confront harsh truths when they work together on a school project.

In the poverty of the Appalachian coal country in 1908, eight-year-old Minna's life gets even more difficult after her father dies of black lung, and that winter she cannot go to school because she does not have a coat--until the quilting mothers make her a coat using pieces of cloth from their own lives, each with a special story behind it.

"Set in Depression Era Virginia, this is the story of orphaned Amelia and her struggle to keep her siblings together"-- With her mama recently dead and her pa sight unseen since birth, Amelia is suddenly in charge of her younger brother and sister-- and the family gas station. To keep a competitor at bay and keep her family out of foster care, Melia must come up with a father-- fast. When a hobo rolls out of a passing truck, Melia grabs opportunity...

"In a southern Virginia coal-mining town in December 1942, Bone Phillips is learning to control her Gift: seeing the history of a significant object when she touches it. But one object is off limits: Uncle Ash's World War I dog tags, which hold memories of terror. When a body identified as Uncle Ash turns up inside the mines, Bone will need every ounce of courage she can summon to not only find her beloved uncle through the dog tags but prove that...

Most people think that the Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954 meant that schools were integrated with deliberate speed. But the children of Prince Edward County located in Farmville, Virginia, who were prohibited from attending formal schools for five years knew differently, including Yolanda. Told by Yolanda Gladden herself, cowritten by Dr. Tamara Pizzoli and with illustrations by Keisha Morris, When the Schools Shut Down is a true account...