Women through the Pages

It's the final week of Women's History of Month and we've got a few more books up our sleeve we want you to read. These books are either written by or about amazing women and they are available for your group to read through our Book Club in a Box program. Check these out!

Mississippi Collection

Collected Stories  by Eudora Welty - With a preface written by the author especially for this edition, this is the complete collection of stories by Eudora Welty. Including the earlier collections A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen, as well as previously uncollected ones, these forty-one stories demonstrate Eudora Welty's talent for writing from diverse points-of-view with “vision that is sweet by nature, always humanizing, uncannily objective, but never angry” (Washington Post).

The Help by Kathryn Stockett - Aibileen is a black maid in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, who's always taken orders quietly, but lately she's unable to hold her bitterness back. Her friend Minny has never held her tongue but now must somehow keep secrets about her employer that leave her speechless. White socialite Skeeter just graduated college. She's full of ambition, but without a husband, she's considered a failure. Together, these seemingly different women join together to write a tell-all book about work as a black maid in the South, that could forever alter their destinies and the life of a small town...

Native Guard  by Natasha Trethewey - Through elegiac verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South -- where one of the first black regiments, the Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War. Trethewey's resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history.

The Last Resort: Taking the Mississippi Cure  by Norma Watkins – The memoir begins in childhood at Allison's Wells, a popular Mississippi spa for proper white people, run by her aunt. Young Norma wonders at a caste system that has colored people cooking every meal while forbidding their sitting with whites to eat. Once integration is court-mandated, her beloved father becomes a stalwart captain in defense of Jim Crow. A fine house, wonderful children, and a successful husband do not compensate for the shock of Mississippi's brutal response to change. When a civil rights lawyer offers love and escape, does a good southern lady dare leave her home state and closed society behind?

The Healing  by Jonathan Odell - In Antebellum Mississippi, Granada Satterfield has the mixed fortune to be born on the same day that her plantation mistress's daughter, Becky, dies of cholera. Believing that the newborn possesses some of her daughter's spirit, the Mistress Amanda adopts Granada and gives her a special place in the family despite her husband's protests. When The Master brings a woman named Polly Shine to help quell the debilitating plague that is sweeping through the slave quarters, Granada's life changes. Polly sees something in the young girl, a spark of "The Healing" 

Young Adult Collection            

Divergent by Veronica Roth - In Beatrice Prior's dystopian Chicago world, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue--Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). All sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is--she can't have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself. But she also has a secret, one she's kept hidden from everyone because she's been warned it can mean death. 

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein - A British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France. Its pilot and passenger are best friends. One of the girls has a chance at survival. The other has lost the game before it's barely begun. When “Verity” is arrested by the Gestapo, she's sure she doesn’t stand a chance. As a secret agent captured in enemy territory, she’s living a spy’s worst nightmare. Her Nazi interrogators give her a simple choice: reveal her mission or face a grisly execution. But will trading her secrets be enough to save her from the enemy?




Valuing the Vote Collection

With Courage and Cloth : Winning the Fight for a Woman's Right to Vote by Ann Bausum - Stunning archival photographs—some never before published—reams of research, and a deft and lively narrative tell this story as if it were hot off today's headlines. Any reader of this book won't easily forget the sacrifice and struggle of women who rose to champion Susan B. Anthony's 1876 clarion call: "We ask that all the civil and political rights that belong to citizens of the United States be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever."

This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kay Mills - From her birth as the twentieth child of poor Mississippi sharecroppers, through her life as first a victim and then a champion of victim's rights and a leader of the civil rights movement, Kay Mills left no stone in Mrs. Hamer's life unturned.









For more information on any of these books or to reserve a kit for your library, please contact Ally Mellon at 601-432-4117 or amellon@mlc.lib.ms.us