Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Mama Day (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Gloria Naylor

On the island of Willow Springs, off the Georgia coast, the powers of healer Mama Day are tested by her great niece, Cocoa, a stubbornly emancipated woman endangered by the island's darker forces. A powerful generational saga at once tender and suspenseful, overflowing with magic and common sense.

72 Hour Hold

by Bebe Moore Campbell

Trina is eighteen and suffers from bi-polar disorder, making her paranoid, wild, and violent. Frightened by her own child, Keri searches for help, quickly learning that the mental health community can only offer her a seventy-two hour hold. After these three days Trina is off on her own again. Fed up with the bureaucracy and determined to save her daughter by any means necessary, Keri signs on for an illegal... (more)

Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman's Journey Through Depression

Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman's Journey Through Depression

by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah

This moving memoir of an African-American woman's lifelong fight to identify and overcome depression offers an inspirational story of healing and emergence. Wrapped within Danquah's engaging account of this universal affliction is rare and insightful testimony about what it means to be black, female, and battling depression in a society that often idealizes black women as strong, nurturing caregivers. A... (more)

Stigmata: A Novel

by Phyllis Alesia Perry

A powerful and imaginative debut novel about the legacy of slavery, and the psychological mystery surrounding a troubled young woman. When Lizzie Du Bose inherits a handmade quilt willed to her by a maternal grandmother she has never met, her life is forever changed. The figures sewn into the quilt tell the stories of Lizzie's grandmother Grace, and Grace's grandmother Ayo, who was abducted from Africa as a girl... (more)

Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, South End Press Classics Edition (South End Press Classics Series)

Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, South End Press Classics Edition (South End Press Classics Series)

by Bell Hooks

When Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery was originally released in 1994, it won critical praise and solidified bell hooks' reputation as one of the leading public intellectuals of her generation. Today, the book is considered a classic in African American and feminist circles. In Sisters of the Yam , hooks examines how the emotional health of black women is wounded by daily assaults of racism... (more)

Corregidora (Five Star)

by Gayl Jones

Here is Gayl Jones's classic novel, the tale of blues singer Ursa, consumed by her hatred of the nineteenth-century slave master who fathered both her grandmother and mother. "Corregidora is the most brutally honest and painful revelation of what has occurred, and is occurring, in the souls of Black men and women." —James Baldwin

Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African American Women

Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African American Women

by Gloria T. Hull

A celebration of the journey of African American women toward a new spirituality grounded in social awareness, black American tradition, metaphysics, and heightened creativity. * Features illuminating insights from Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Lucille Clifton, Dolores Kendrick, Sonia Sanchez, Michele Gibbs, Geraldine McIntosh, Masani Alexis DeVeaux and Namonyah Soipan. * By a widely published scholar,... (more)

The Healing

by Gayl Jones

Harlan Jane Eagleton is a faith healer who travels from town to town converting sceptics, restoring minds and bodies. Harlan tells her story from the end backwards, drawing us deeper into her world and the mystery at the heart of the tale - the story of her first healing.

Beloved

by Toni Morrison

Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the decade. "A brutally powerful, mesmerizing story . . . read it and tremble."--People.

The Bluest Eye

by Toni Morrison

The chronicle of the tragic lives of a poor black family in 1940s America. Every night Pecola, unlovely and unloved, prays for blue eyes like those of her white schoolfellows. She becomes the focus of the mingled love and hatred engendered by her family's frailty and the world's cruelty.

The Salt Eaters (Vintage Contemporaries)

The Salt Eaters (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Toni Cade Bambara

Set in Claybourne, a small town somewhere in the South, THE SALT EATERS is the story of a community of black faith healers who, searching for the healing properties of salt, witness an event that will change their lives forever.

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf

by Ntozake Shange

From its inception in California in 1974 to its highly acclaimed critical success at Joseph Papp's Public Theater and on Broadway, the Obie Award-winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country. Passionate and fearless, Shange's words reveal what it is to be of color and female in the twentieth century. First... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: black women and healing

Mama Day (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Gloria Naylor

72 Hour Hold

by Bebe Moore Campbell

Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman's Journey Through Depression

by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah

Stigmata: A Novel

by Phyllis Alesia Perry

Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, South End Press Classics Edition (South End Press Classics Series)

by Bell Hooks

Corregidora (Five Star)

by Gayl Jones

Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African American Women

by Gloria T. Hull

The Healing

by Gayl Jones

Beloved

by Toni Morrison

The Bluest Eye

by Toni Morrison

The Salt Eaters (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Toni Cade Bambara

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf

by Ntozake Shange