Showing results by narrator "Lynnette Freeman" in All Categories

The past always has a way of catching up with you. Charisma Canton was born and raised in the heart of Baltimore, where she learns that a moment's pleasure can sometimes lead to a life of pain. Against her better judgment, she has a one-night stand that changes her life forever. Turning over the family business to her cousin, she leaves behind her past. Charisma moves to Miami, where she meets Mr. Manny Manifesto, aka Mr. Baseball.

The Lord gives her a list of unknown individuals urgently needing deliverance. The intercessors and prayer warriors are charged with leading them to Christ. Once every soul is accounted for, Jesus will come to redeem His saints, and judgment will begin on the earth.

In a country divided between humans and witchers, Venus Stoneheart hustles as a brewer making illegal love potions to support her family. Love potions is a dangerous business. Brewing has painful, debilitating side effects, and getting caught means death or a prison sentence. But what Venus is most afraid of is the dark, sentient magic within her. Then an enemy's iron bullet kills her mother, Venus's life implodes. When the powerful Grand Witcher, the ruthless head of her coven, offers Venus the chance to punish her mother's killer, she has to pay a steep price for revenge.

With her holistic approach to filling your life with comfort, balance, and peace, Debrena Jackson Gandy debunks society's myth that doing something for yourself is decadent and selfish. In fact, she says, the joy we gain from treating ourselves--whether to a luxuriant bath or to a meditative hour alone--is transferred to the people in our lives. When we emerge rejuvenated, others benefit from a patient mother, a fulfilled wife, an effective coworker, a solidly grounded friend.

Trent July has been the mayor of this historic town for the past four years, but now he’s ready to let someone else take up the mantle. But when a surprise candidate also enters the ring, the town has opinions on who would be the best candidate. And of course that’s not the only drama, as Malachi “Mal” July continues to make reparations for the damage he’s caused and to the people he’s betrayed, especially his lady love Bernadine. Is she finally ready to forgive him and let the past go?

Cora was born with a veil. She is able to discern spirits and wield the power of both the dark and the light as well as the ability to heal. Her grandmother, Mi, called it The Knowing. Cora has carried it as both a prophetic blessing and a curse, struggling under the burden until one decision changes her world. Possessed with a healer’s compulsion to help, she is unable to turn away when Fannie arrives on her doorstep, ripped, torn, and hanging precariously on the knife’s edge of death.

Multiple times a day, in cities across the US and beyond, a simple yet powerful message is repeated by the well-meaning, the ignorant, and the bigoted: “don’t go”—avoid at all costs those Black and Brown disinvested neighborhoods that have become bywords for social disorder and urban decay. This book is a collection of intimate stories that uncover the hidden influence of both subtle and overt “don’t go” messages and the segregation they perpetuate in Chicago.

When summoned to Georgetown, South Carolina, sisters Mariah Clark and Sabrina Holland both assume their ailing grandfather's health has gotten worse. Neither expects their grandmother's undeniable request—save the family restaurant. Mariah is at a crossroad in her life. After being dumped by her husband and forced to walk away from their diner that she helped rescue from bankruptcy, bitter feelings consume her. Even though the restaurant has been in the family for eighty-six years, giving her all to another struggling business isn't something she wants to do.

Tamar July has never had a great relationship with certain members of her family. But when her cousin calls her with the news that she's dying and wants Tamar to plan the funeral, she's shocked but is willing to drop everything for her. After a horrendous storm, Gemma finds a young boy and his little sister walking on the side of the road. When Gemma contacts Social Services to try to become their foster mother, she's told a white woman cannot foster African-American children. In the midst of these trials, Jack and Rocky are trying to plan their wedding.

Vegas Duncan's release from prison is right on time for his older brother Junior's engagement to the voluptuous Sonya Brown. Unfortunately Junior's attempt at happiness comes to a screeching halt when Sonya's husband, the mysterious Brother X, and his army of Muslim hit men declare war on the Duncan clan. Duncan family patriarch LC Duncan has gone up against many foes in his time.

Malachi “Mal” July has run into trouble in the past. With a reputation as a player, he’s now a recovering alcoholic and has made progress in redeeming himself in the eyes of his family and the citizens of Henry Adams, Kansas. He’s turned his diner into a profitable business, and mentors the town’s foster kids. And he’s even staying true to one woman - Bernadine Brown. But all it takes is a moment of pride to blind Mal to his blessings - a moment that makes him betray his friends and family, and lose Bernadine’s trust and love. Will he ever be able to win her forgiveness?

Ady, a curious, sharp-witted girl, and her fierce mother, Sanite, are inseparable. Enslaved to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the pair spend their days reminiscing about their family’s rebellious and storied history and dreaming of a loving future. When mother and daughter are separated, Ady is left hopeless and directionless until she stumbles into the Mockingbird Inn and meets Lenore, a free Black woman with whom she becomes fast friends. Lenore invites Ady to join a clandestine society of spies called the Daughters.

A mistress-turned-wife with a dream marriage gone wrong. The perfect plan for payback. And fallout so explosive, even winning may mean losing it all. The new Mrs. Rashad Eason can't believe it. She dreamed, schemed, and seduced her way to media adoration and a fairy-tale wedding to the lover she stole from his wife. But the honeymoon phase turns into something more shattering when the groom begins to reminisce about his ex, Kiara, and devises a plan to win her back.

Originally published forty years ago, Alice Walker’s first collection of nonfiction is a dazzling compendium that remains both timely and relevant. In these thirty-six essays, Walker contemplates her own work and that of other writers, considers the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, and writes vividly and courageously about a scarring childhood injury.

The iconic Black hood, like slavery and Jim Crow, is a peculiar American institution animated by the ideology of white supremacy. Politicians and people of all colors propagated “ghetto” myths to justify racist policies that concentrated poverty in the hood and created high-opportunity white spaces. In White Space, Black Hood, Sheryll Cashin traces the history of anti-Black residential caste - boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and stereotype-driven surveillance - and unpacks its current legacy....

Stephanie Rose Bird grew up surrounded by forests, listening to the stories of her ancestors and learning African healing ways. From an early age, she dedicated herself to herbalism and living a spiritually fulfilled life in harmony with nature. Now, the wisdom she as accrued is gathered in this impressive encyclopedic work of African Healing and herbal medicine. Stephanie teaches you how to garden and harvest in unison with the seasons, and how to use herbalism and magic—derived from ancestral and spiritual helpers—to heal.

Lila Bonnard has left her island home in the Caribbean to join the faculty as a visiting professor at Mayfield College in a small Vermont town. On her way from the airport to Mayfield, Lila witnesses the fatal shooting of a Black man by the police. It turns out that the victim was a professor at Mayfield, and was giving CPR to a white woman who was on the verge of an opioid overdose. The two Black faculty and a Black administrator in the otherwise all-white college expect Lila to be a witness in the case against the police.

Lottie Rebecca Lee is spoken into the world in Fayetteville, North Carolina, by a Black nurse who declares, “Lord Jesus, if that ain’t the blackest little baby born this side of heaven.” Later, Lottie will prove that she is the ancestors’ promise to unearth the Mississippi and Ghanaian atrocities that have tormented Benjamin Lee, her grandfather who was born during the Great Depression in Mississippi’s red clay tobacco fields, and Benjamin Junior, his son and Lottie Rebecca’s father, born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where the post Korean War GI Bill promises prosperity.

In Nothing Like a Dame, theater journalist Eddie Shapiro opens a jewelry box full of glittering surprises, through in-depth conversations with twenty leading women of Broadway. He carefully selected Tony Award-winning stars who have spent the majority of their careers in theater, leaving aside those who have moved on or occasionally drop back in. The women he interviewed spent endless hours with him, discussing their careers, offering insights into the iconic shows, changes on Broadway over the last century, and the art (and thrill) of taking the stage night after night.

Coral is the first person to discover her brother Jay’s dead body in the wake of his suicide. There’s no note, only a drably furnished bachelor pad in Long Beach, California, and a cell phone with a handful of numbers in it. Coral pockets the phone. And then she starts responding to texts as her dead brother. Over the course of one week, Coral, the successful yet lonely author of a hit dystopian novel, Wildfire, becomes increasingly untethered from reality. Blindsided by grief and operating with reckless determination, she doubles—and triples—down on posing as her brother.