2021 - 2022
Education for Mission
Gum Moon: A Novel of San Francisco Chinatown - Jeffrey L Staley
In 1898, three-year-old Chinese-American girl Mei Chun Lai is sold to a cruel brothel keeper, where a sympathetic prostitute befriends her. Two years later, at the height of a plague quarantine, a young Methodist woman rescues Chun and places her in a home for abused and trafficked girls. The home is destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire. Chun (aka “Maud”) and a group of seven other Chinese children embark on a cross-country singing tour to raise funds to rebuild. When their home matron suffers a breakdown, 13-year-old Maud must lead the band of children home. Based on a true story. |
One Dress. One Year. One Girl's Stand Against Human Trafficking -
Bethany Winz & Susana Foth Aughtmon **** Youth - May read children's and youth books after reading 10 books. When sixteen-year-old Bethany Winz learned about the millions of men, women and children around the world trapped in slavery, she wondered: How can anyone do that to another human being? And why aren’t we doing something? Journey with her as she wears the same black dress every day for a year to focus attention on the lack of choices people in modern-day slavery face and raises money to help end human trafficking. |
Leadership Development
Becoming - Michelle Obama
Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America— the first African American to serve in that role—she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House, while establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls and standing with her husband as he led the nation. In her memoir, Michelle Obama chronicles the experiences that have shaped her—from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing motherhood and work to her time spent at the world’s most famous address. |
Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race - Margot Lee Shetterly
Before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of African-American female mathematicians were among those who served as NASA’s “human computers,” calculating fight paths and playing a crucial role in America’s space program. Moving from World War II through NASA’s golden age— touching on the civil rights era, the Space Race, the Cold War and the women’s rights movement— this book interweaves a rich history of humankind’s space explorations with the intimate stories of fve courageous women whose work forever changed the world. Based of true story. |
Nurturing Community
Dangling: I May Have Cancer, but Cancer Doesn't Have Me! - Amy Carr
Are you or someone you love facing cancer? Perhaps you are coping with a chronic illness or facing one of the biggest disappointments of your life. Have you ever wondered how such a trial could change your life for the better? This is a personal story about how sometimes God teaches life-changing lessons that we otherwise would not have learned. |
Becoming Grandma: The Joys and Science of the New Grandparenting - Lesley Stahl
After four decades as a reporter, Lesley Stahl’s most vivid and transformative experience was not covering the White House, interviewing heads of state or researching stories at “60 Minutes”. It was becoming a grandmother. She felt such an intense and unexpected jolt of joy she decided to “investigate” it. Through her own stories, personal accounts from friends, colleagues and the proverbial woman next door, as well as interviews with doctors, anthropologists and psychiatrists, Stahl unpacks how becoming a grandmother changes a woman’s life. |
Before We Were Yours - Novel - Lisa Wingate
This riveting, wrenching and ultimately uplifting tale is based on one of America’s most notorious real-life scandals—in which Georgia Tann, director of a Memphis-based adoption organization, kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country. The narrators are present-day attorney and heir apparent to her father’s Senate seat, Avery Stafford, and Rill Foss, a young girl growing up with her siblings on her family’s Mississippi River shanty boat in the 1930s. The House on Lowell Street - Novel - Linda A. Keane
Rose Morrison’s comfortable life as a banker’s wife is upended when her husband dies and leaves her with formidable debt. To help support herself and her son, she takes in two seamstresses from the corset factory. But trouble is brewing at the factory, where a union contract is about to expire, and Rose finds herself confronted with confusing moral choices. Based on a true event: the strike of the Kalamazoo corset workers in 1921 She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman - Erica Armstrong
Harriet Tubman is best known as one of the most famous conductors on the Underground Railroad. In this tribute, Erica Armstrong Dunbar blends traditional biography with artwork and sidebars to create a fresh and accessible take on one of the most exceptional women in American history. We learn that Tubman not only helped liberate hundreds of slaves, she was the first woman to lead an armed expedition during the Civil War, worked as a spy for the Union Army, and was a fierce suffragist as well as an advocate for the aged. Suitable for youth. Grit in Juarez: Beyond the Wall - Marion Surles
How do the children live just across the wall at our southern border? Cristal and Fina struggle to find enough to eat as they raise themselves on the streets in Juarez, Mexico. Daniel worries about his little brother, Memo, who has serious respiratory attacks because of the pollution and desert climate. Life is hard on the border, but pastors Miguel and Pati want to lead a church that’s responsive to the needs of their community. Can the local church help the families work together as Christ’s family to ease each other’s burdens? |
Social Action
Girl Gone Mission: A Cash Blackbear Mystery - Marcie R. Rendon
Nineteen-year-old Anishinabe woman Renee “Cash” Blackbear hears about a blonde girl in her English class who has gone missing. And then another. She begins to dream about blonde girls calling for help; they’re in Minneapolis. She’s never been far from the Red River and she’s never heard of white slavery. Then, suddenly, she’s locked inside a room with the lost girls. She needs to find a way out. |
The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector's Story - Hyeonseo Lee
As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee was one of millions trapped by a secretive and brutal communist regime. When the famine of the 1990s struck, she realized that surely her country could not be, as she’d been told, “the best on the planet.” What follows is the story of her escape from North Korea at age 17, and her terrifying struggle to avoid capture/repatriation and guide her family to freedom. |
The Leavers - Novel - Lisa Ko
One morning, Deming Guo’s mother, Polly, an undocumented Chinese immigrant, goes to her job at a nail salon—and never comes home. Set in New York and China, this moving story of how a boy comes into his own when everything he loves is taken away, and of a mother who is forced to make one heart-wrenching choice after another, is a vivid examination of borders and belonging. |
Separated by the Border: A Birth Mother, a Foster Mother, and a Migrant Child's 3,000-Mile Journey - Gena Thomas
In 2017, five-year-old Julia was separated from her mother, Guadalupe, during a harrowing journey from Honduras to the United States. Gina Thomas, a Spanish-speaking missionary who became Julia’s foster mother, witnessed firsthand the ways migrant children experience trauma. Weaving together the stories of birth mother and foster mother, this book shows the human face of the immigrant and refugee, the challenges of the immigration and foster care systems, and the tenacious power of motherly love. |
Small Great Things - Novel - Jodi Picoult
During a routine checkup on a newborn, labor and delivery nurse Ruth Jefferson is told that she’s been reassigned to another patient. The parents are white supremacists and don’t want Ruth, who is African American, to touch their child. When the baby goes into cardiac distress the next day while Ruth is alone in the nursery, a gripping series of events unfold that will lead readers to question everything they know about privilege, power and race. |
Spiritual Growth
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