Nia, is a young girl who loves learning about dance but is a bit too shy to really get our there. In "A Little Optimism Goes a Long Way," readers follow her journey falling in love with dancing and finding her voice despite her initial hesitation.
Search results: 22 results for “by Charlene Allen”
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22 results
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Play the Game
Play the Game
by Charlene Allen
$19.99*ships in 7-10 business days
Debut author Charlene Allen delivers a captivating YA contemporary mystery about a teen boy trying to keep his best friend’s legacy alive through a video game while getting swept up in a murder investigation that points to his other best friend as the prime suspect.
In the game of life, sometimes other people hold all the controls. Or so it seems to VZ. Four months have passed and he still can’t believe his best friend Ed was killed by a white man in a Brooklyn parking lot. VZ and his other best friend Jack grieve in their own ways: Jack leads protests about Ed’s murder, but VZ can’t bring himself to do the same . . . and the two of them don’t talk much anymore.
Then Singer, the man who killed Ed, is found dead in the same spot where Ed was murdered. And all signs point to Jack as the prime suspect. But there’s no way Jack could have done it, right? For VZ, it’s time to show up for his friends. He’s going to complete the video game Ed never finished and enter it into a big gaming contest. And he’s going to figure out who actually killed Singer.
With help from Diamond, the girl he’s crushing on at work, VZ falls into Ed’s quirky gameiverse. As the police close in on Jack, the game starts to uncover details that could lead to the truth about the murder. Can VZ honor Ed and help Jack before it’s too late?
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Good Morning Means I Love You: A Novel
Good Morning Means I Love You: A Novel
$28.00The electrifying and intimate first novel from the author of The Collection Plate and Fruit Punch, a searing story of a young Texan woman and the family she makes with two men
“A couple years after Noon and I fall in love, we fall in love with Micah—and a couple years after that, I have both of their babies. We choose, this land and this life. We share, ourselves and our sons. We name them, Morning and Night.”
In her arresting first novel, Kendra Allen investigates love, partnership, motherhood, pleasure and the pursuit of freedom in one young woman’s defiantly unconventional terms. Rae has just returned to her family after leaving for a stretch and suddenly – that family being her two male partners and the sons, named Morning and Night, that she has mothered with each of them. In the span of one year, they will experience unfathomable depths of devastation—and joys they could never predict.
Good Morning Means I Love You follows Rae as she makes choices around sex, mothering, and partnership that are as stunning to everyone else as they are natural to herself. With pain and pleasure, she watches as her children learn to walk and give language to the world as her lovers contend with their own ideas of masculinity, personhood, and fatherhood. Along the way, Rae begins to understand the hardest and most beautiful truth: that we have only so much time on earth to make love, to make family, and to make good on the promise of this one, short life.
This is a novel of the self in all its simultaneities and a living portrait of intimacy written in poetic, bold, and sensual prose that shines a light on what it means to redefine expectation. -
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Danielle Allen
$18.99Julie Murphy's If the Shoe Fits meets Talia Hibbert's Take a Hint, Dani Brown―USA Today bestselling author Danielle Allen brings another steamy, witty novel about finding the perfect partner―and how sometimes what you're looking for is right in front of you.
“I only spend time with people I enjoy. I only do things I want to do. I only have sex with people who get me off. So, my time is never wasted and my energy stays high.”
Nina Ford doesn’t like to put all her eggs in one basket. She works multiple jobs, she enjoys multiple hobbies, she dates multiple men.
In her thirty years of life, Nina has never come across a man who has all the things she’s looking for.
She loves fun and excitement―and she has a man for that.
She loves confidence and humor―and she has a man for that.
She loves intelligence and ambition―and she has a man for that.
She loves passion and romance―and she has a man for that.
She’s always been content rotating a few men in and out of her life to get her needs met. But when an opportunity presents itself, Nina finds herself in a bit of a predicament. Because if everything she’s ever wanted in a partner collides with everything she’s ever wanted in a career, her eggs are bound to get cracked.
Like her back.
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Dancing in the Wings
Dancing in the Wings
by Debbie Allen
$17.99*Ships in 7-10 business days*
Sassy worries that her too-large feet, too-long legs, and even her big mouth will keep her from her dream of becoming a star ballerina. So for now she's just dancing in the wings, watching from behind the curtain, and hoping that one day it will be her turn to shimmer in the spotlight. When the director of an important dance festival comes to audition her class, Sassy's first attempts to get his attention are, well, a little wobbly. But Sassy just knows, somehow, that this is her time to step out from those wings, and make her mark on the world. Actress/choreographer Debbie Allen and Kadir Nelson collaborated on Brothers of the Knight, about which School Library Journal raved, "the strutting high-stepping brothers are full of individuality, attitude, and movement."
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A Little Optimism Goes a Long Way
A Little Optimism Goes a Long Way
Stacey Allen and Brynne Henry(Illustrator)
$20.00 -
Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements
Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements
$22.95A manifesto from one of America's most influential activists which disrupts political, economic, and social norms by reimagining the Black Radical Tradition.
Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements, Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist. This book provides a vision for how social justice movements can become sharper and more effective through principled struggle, healing justice, and leadership development. It also offers a flexible model of what deeply effective organizing can be, anchored in the Chicago model of activism, which features long-term commitment, cultural sensitivity, creative strategizing, and multiple cross-group alliances. And Unapologetic provides a clear framework for activists committed to building transformative power, encouraging young people to see themselves as visionaries and leaders.
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Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements
Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements
by Charlene Carruthers
$14.95*ships in 7-10 business days*
A manifesto from one of America's most influential activists which disrupts political, economic, and social norms by reimagining the Black Radical Tradition.
Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements, Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist. This book provides a vision for how social justice movements can become sharper and more effective through principled struggle, healing justice, and leadership development. It also offers a flexible model of what deeply effective organizing can be, anchored in the Chicago model of activism, which features long-term commitment, cultural sensitivity, creative strategizing, and multiple cross-group alliances. And Unapologetic provides a clear framework for activists committed to building transformative power, encouraging young people to see themselves as visionaries and leaders. -
All Your Racial Problems Will Soon End: The Cartoons of Charles Johnson
All Your Racial Problems Will Soon End: The Cartoons of Charles Johnson
by Charles Johnson
$34.95*ships/available for pickup in 7-10 business days
Years before he wrote his National Book Award–winning novel Middle Passage, Charles Johnson created these sidesplitting and subversive gag comics about Black life in America, now collected for the first time in nearly half a century.
Before Charles Johnson found fame as a novelist and won the National Book Award for Middle Passage in 1991, he was a cartoonist, and a very good one.
Taught via mail correspondence course by the comics editor Lawrence Lariar, mentored by the New Yorker cartoonist Charles Barsotti, and inspired by the call of poet Amiri Baraka to celebrate and depict Black life in America, Johnson crafted some of the fiercest and funniest cartoons of the twentieth century.
Reimagining the gag comic as a powerful and incendiary tool, Johnson tackled America’s mid-century afflictions—segregation, inner-city poverty, police brutality, and white supremacy—by craftily subverting stale gag tropes. He populated them with bullet-dodging Black Panthers, doubt-filled Klansmen, militant babies, self-serving politicians, and complacent suburban liberals.
This collection, Johnson’s first in nearly fifty years, brings together work from across his career: college newspaper gags, selections from his books Black Humor and Half-Past Nation Time, his unpublished manuscript Lumps in the Melting Pot, and uncollected pieces. Taken together, this volume reveals Johnson as long overdue for appreciation as a cartoonist of the first order. -
PRE-ORDER: A Carnival Jangle
PRE-ORDER: A Carnival Jangle
$9.99From the landmark writer and activist of the Harlem Renaissance, Alice Dunbar Nelson, A Carnival Jangle is a powerful and unflinching collection of stories inspired by her early life in New Orleans.
These are stories of love, betrayal and fortitude, peopled by an array of vivid characters whose dramas bring alive Creole life in the late nineteenth century.
Women must walk a tightrope between respectability and desire in stories such as 'A Carnival Jangle'. Poverty is tackled head-on in the moving stories 'M'sieu Fortier’s Violin' and 'Little Miss Sophie', whilst Catholic faith mixed with Creole spirituality looms large in 'The Goodness of St. Rocque and Odalie'.
This series of pocket-sized paperbacks celebrates the art of the short story and marks Macmillan Collector's Library's 10th anniversary. Each contains a curated selection of short stories from a literary giant: Katherine Mansfield, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, James, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Alice Dunbar Nelson, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Rabindranath Tagore.
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PRE-ORDER: You Better Love What You See: Living with Joy, Confidence, and Unapologetic Self-Worth
PRE-ORDER: You Better Love What You See: Living with Joy, Confidence, and Unapologetic Self-Worth
$30.00Hollywood icon and Emmy Award-winning Abbott Elementary actress Sheryl Lee Ralph shares the personal stories that have shaped her and the advice that has guided her throughout her life—helping readers breathe deeper, love stronger, and rise higher.
Sheryl Lee Ralph understands a truth most of us learn the hard way: There are moments in life when you must let your light shine. Moments when the noise of the world tries to mute your mic and silence your voice, dull your glow, and convince you to forget who you are. She has known those moments intimately—under the bright lights of Broadway and in the quiet hum of hospital rooms, on red carpets and in church pews. Sheryl has worn crowns and carried a few crosses, but through it all remained her unshakable faith in one simple belief: better must come. No matter how many times life knocks you down, you can rise, you must rise, reclaim yourself, and begin again.
You Better Love What You See isn’t a list of commandments to make you feel guilty, a to-do list, or the play-by-play story of an actor’s life. Filled with boundless empathy and wisdom, it’s a moving guide for anyone who wonders if they’re enough, who wants to lead with love and heal themselves, or who still battles with self-doubt.
Sheryl’s reflections draw from her life as a performer, mother, daughter, wife, sister, and above all a wise, wild woman. She shares stories about remaining determined in the face of defeat, overcoming obstacles when systemic oppression tried to keep her down, and how to find strength in every storm, including:
* Experiences from her childhood as the only girl of color in her Catholic school, to being fired from a TV role for not being “Black enough”
* Enrolling in the very first coed class at Rutgers University
* Bringing down the house with her historic Emmy Award win and acceptance speech
* And many more inspiring moments touching on themes such as faith, resilience, choosing joy, and finding purposeSheryl’s warm and empowering message is that, bottom line, when you look in the mirror, you better love what you see, because feeling powerful and purposeful won’t come from external accolades or approval—it starts with YOU. Her strong, authentic voice and magnetic presence are evident on every page—and readers will return to it again and again whenever their light is feeling a little dim.
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PRE-ORDER: Strength in Numbers: The 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott
PRE-ORDER: Strength in Numbers: The 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott
$19.99From the 2025 Children’s Literature Legacy Award winner, New York Times bestselling, and multiple award-winning author Carole Boston Weatherford comes a powerful nonfiction picture book that follows the individual acts of courage behind the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott.
In Montgomery, everyone relied on the city’s buses, but only white riders could sit in the front. If white riders needed more seats, Black riders had to give theirs up. And the white bus drivers would call the police whenever they wanted to. How could the Black community fight for their rights?
With incredible coordination and planning, Black people across the city carefully planned a boycott. When Rosa Parks was arrested after refusing to give her seat up to a white rider, they were ready to act. But, as the months drew on, everyone found themselves wondering: What would it take to end the boycott?
Award-winning team Carole Boston Weatherford and Noa Denmon unite to tell the remarkable story of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and the people who achieved justice by working together.
* Important American History: This book spotlights the collective action of the Civil Rights Movement.
* Unsung Heroes: Strength in Numbers celebrates the many people who made the long bus boycott a success.
* Impressive Back Matter: This book features an extensive timeline, along with additional information about the Montgomery Bus Boycott. -
It's You Every Time
It's You Every Time
Charlene Thomas
Sold outA story about self-discovery, grief, and destiny that begs the question: How do you keep going when your world has stopped spinning?
When Sydney Michaels stops for breakfast in order to put off scholastic ruin a little longer, she never expected to―quite literally―bump into cute-boy stranger, Marcus Burke.
When Marcus invites her to have breakfast with him instead of going to class, she can’t ignore the urge to get to know him better―or the fact that this charming new acquaintance seems just as interested in her.
After a magical day together in their hometown of New York City, Sydney is finally willing to believe that maybe―just maybe―after years of loss and heartache, she’s finally reached the good part.
But when it comes time to say goodbye, as they linger in a crosswalk, something happens. An accident? Sydney isn’t sure―all she knows is that, after screeching tires, blinding headlights, and a moment of searing pain, she opens her eyes and is back in her bed. On September 24–the morning of her big exam―again.
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