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"Run away from the boy that gives you butterflies, he's going to break your heart." Morgan Atkins has been faithfully living by that creed ever since her heart was broken by her first love. She's terrified of feeling that rush and those butterflies again. She's settled down with a respectable man, and lives comfortably and in luxury. She has everything and wants for nothing...but her life is missing that spark.

When someone from her past erupts into her perfect life, Morgan starts to feel that rush again. Those butterflies. And while her mind tells her she shouldn't be going down this road, her heart tells her something else. The more involved she becomes in the illicit affair that follows, the more she can't tell the difference between right and wrong. Someone will end up hurt. Someone may end up dead. Will Morgan survive this storm? Or will she be ruined again by the ultimate heartbreak?

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"Love should burn slowly, but with Ezra 'Ethic' Okafor it is always fleeting. After an accidental killing affects Alani, the woman he loves, she thinks he's a monster. Separated by tragedy, the pair endure a loss like nothing they have ever felt and their connection is impossible to repair. Ethic is reduced to misery and raising his children alone once again. With Morgan in the throes of a passionate love affair and Bella in need of guidance that he can't provide, Ethic is in turmoil"--Back cover.

A lyrical picture book from the award-winning author of Heavy, about three Black boys who form a deep connection during a transformative summer trip down South to visit family.

On the ground of that garden, covered in vegetables and dirt, coated in laughter, I want to say that the Mississippi and New York in our Black boy bodies were indistinguishable.

Three Black boys spend one special summer exploring the Mississippi woods and woulds and coulds of sharing the kind of freeing friendship that is love.

Watched over and given space to discover by Grandmama and Mama Lara, New York, Country, and little C find camaraderie in their contrasts and all the unspoken things between them while playing games of marco polo in the thick garden and sledding on cardboard by the underpass.

With text brimming with love by award-winning author Kiese Laymon and deeply evocative illustrations by Ashley Franklin, City Summer, Country Summer illuminates the tenuous and tender bonds of friendship Black boys forge with one another.

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The final book to the legendary Ethic series by Ashley Antoinette concludes the heart wrenching story of Ezra Okafor. Will he find forever with his one true love? Will Alani ever truly forgive Ethic, or are they destined to say goodbye? Will Morgan and Messiah repair their love before it's too late? Step into Ethic Land once more as Antoinette pens the greatest love story of this generation. An instant classic ends here. The question is, will it end happily ever after or in destruction?

Explore under the sea and beyond with Ariel in the new picture book retelling of Disney's live action The Little Mermaid!

Ariel is a curious mermaid who has always wanted to explore the human world! After saving a prince named Eric from a dangerous shipwreck, Ariel makes a deal with the Sea Witch, Ursula, so she can meet him and learn more about what life is like beyond her ocean home. But Ursula is full of tricks, and it will take all of Ariel’s courage to save the human world and the ocean from the Sea Witch’s devious plans.

If you like this book, you may also want to consider adding these Disney books to your collection: 

• The Little Mermaid: Adventures on Land
• World of Reading: The Little Mermaid: Meet Ariel
• The Little Mermaid: Guide to Merfolk

With previous work hailed by the New York Times as “unflinching” and “piercing”, Ashley M. Jones’s Lullaby for the Grieving is her most personal collection to date.

In her fourth poetry collection, Jones studies the multifaceted nature of grief: the personal grief of losing her father, and the political grief tied to Black Southern identity. How does one find a path through the deep sorrow of losing a parent? What wonders of Blackness have to be suppressed to make way for "progress"?

Journeying through landscapes of Alabama, the Middle Passage and Underground Railroad, interior spaces of loss and love, and her father’s garden, Jones constructs both an elegy for her father and a celebration of the sacred exuberance and audacity of life. Featuring poems from her tenure as Alabama’s first Black and youngest Poet Laureate, Lullaby for the Grieving finds calm in unimaginable storms and attempts to listen for the sounds of healing.

In The Militant South, 1800-1861, John Hope Franklin identifies the factors and causes of the South's festering propensity for aggression that contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861.
 
Franklin asserts that the South was dominated by militant white men who resorted to violence in the face of social, personal, or political conflict. Fueled by their defense of slavery and a persistent desire to keep the North out of their affairs, Southerners adopted a vicious bellicosity that intensified as war drew nearer.
 
Drawing from Southern newspapers, government archives, memoirs, letters, and firsthand accounts, Franklin masterfully details the sources and consequences of antebellum aggression in the South.  First published in 1956, this classic volume is an enduring and impeccably researched contribution to Southern history. This paperback edition features a new preface in which the author discusses controversial responses to the book.

Join us for a montly children's storytime at Kindred Stories. Each Story time will celebrate a special book and be read by a wondertful community mementer. IT also includes a story time. 

Featured Book: Daisy Helps With The Dress 

Featured Reader: Antonia Adams 

EVENT DEETS

When: Saturday, September 26 @ 11 AM CST 

Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St. Houston, TX 77004)

How: 

• RSVP ONLY to reserve your spot and let us know you are coming.

ABOUT DAISY HELPS WITH THE DRESS 

When Daisy tries to help with her cousin’s wedding, her misguided assists almost ruin the big day, until she finds a way to pull the dress—and her family—together in this charming picture book by award-winning author Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich.

Daisy loves helping her family and she knows the best kind of helpers never wait to be asked. That’s why she doesn’t ask before adding finishing touches to her family’s special reused, re-tried, remixed things, like a leftover broccoli topping for Auntie Fontie’s cakes or a good bath for Nana DJ’s “back-in-the-day, rusty, dusty” vintage albums—much to their chagrin.

But what Daisy wants most is to help give her cousin Simone’s recycled wedding dress a little razzle dazzle. She knows just what the vintage dress needs: a little glitter here, a few stickers there to give the dress some flair.

But Daisy’s cousin Simone and the rest of the family are not so happy with her decorations. Can Daisy make things right and help find Simone a new re-lived, re-loved wedding dress?

Selected as one of Hyperallergic’s 15 Art Books We’re Excited to Read in 2026

This book chronicles the transformative impact of Black curators on American art museums since the 1970s as told by visionaries at the forefront of the change.

The relationship between Black Americans and U.S. art museums has historically been fraught and hard-won. In the late 1960s, the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and other groups organized protests at major art museums, calling for the inclusion of Black artists and curators. Such advocacy led to acquisitions and exhibitions by Black artists at important institutions and spurred the establishment of museums and cultural organizations promoting Black art and culture. Today, Black curators hold significant positions at institutions nationwide. Black Curators Matter illuminates this critical history by spotlighting figures who have transformed the art world since the 1970s.

This book presents illuminating conversations between six pioneering curators―Lowery Stokes Sims, Deborah Willis, Richard J. Powell, Kellie Jones, Thelma Golden, and Franklin Sirmans―and a new generation of professionals, including Ashley James, Kalia Brooks, Aaron Bryant, Thomas Jean Lax, Rujeko Hockley, and LeRonn P. Brooks. Capturing the voices and experiences of Black curators, these discussions highlight their achievements and provide guidance for future generations aiming to diversify and enrich the cultural landscape. This volume reexamines the curatorial field to reveal the transformative strategies, critical interventions, and boundary-breaking exhibitions that reshaped American art museums toward greater inclusivity and experimentation.

Celebrate the release of City Summer, Country Summer with Kiese Laymon!

EVENT DEETS

When: Sunday, April 6 @ 2PM

Where: 2304 Stuart Street, HTX, 77004

How: RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat or RSVP WITH BOOK to support the author and our store programming

ABOUT THE BOOK

A lyrical picture book from the award-winning author of Heavy, about three Black boys who form a deep connection during a transformative summer trip down South to visit family.

On the ground of that garden, covered in vegetables and dirt, coated in laughter, I want to say that the Mississippi and New York in our Black boy bodies were indistinguishable.

Three Black boys spend one special summer exploring the Mississippi woods and woulds and coulds of sharing the kind of freeing friendship that is love.

Watched over and given space to discover by Grandmama and Mama Lara, New York, Country, and little C find camaraderie in their contrasts and all the unspoken things between them while playing games of marco polo in the thick garden and sledding on cardboard by the underpass. 

With text brimming with love by award-winning author Kiese Laymon and deeply evocative illustrations by Ashley Franklin, City Summer, Country Summer illuminates the tenuous and tender bonds of friendship Black boys forge with one another.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon is the Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. Laymon is the author of Long Division, which won the 2022 NAACP Image Award for fiction, and the essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, named a notable book of 2021 by the New York Times critics. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Barnes and Noble Discovery Award, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. Laymon is the recipient of 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. Laymon is at work on the books, Good God, and City Summer, Country Summer, and a number of other film and television projects. He is the founder of The Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative, a program based out of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, aimed at aiding young people in Jackson get more comfortable reading, writing, revising and sharing on their on their own terms, in their own communities. He is the co-host of Reckon True Stories with Deesha Philyaw. Kiese Laymon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.