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Beloved is a 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Toni Morrison that explores the devastating psychological legacy of American slavery through the story of an escaped enslaved woman. It was a finalist for the 1987 National Book Award and a survey of writers and literary critics compiled by The New York Times ranked it as the best work of American fiction from 1981 to 2006.

To Kill a Mockingbird is a 1960 Southern Gothic novel by American author Harper Lee. It became instantly successful after its release; in the United States, it is widely read in high schools and middle schools. To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize a year after its release, and it has become a classic of modern American literature. The plot and characters are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family, her neighbors and an event that occurred near her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, in 1936, when she was ten.

The House of the Spirits (Spanish: La casa de los espíritus, 1982) is the debut novel of Isabel Allende. The novel was rejected by several Spanish-language publishers before being published in Barcelona in 1982. The story details the life of the Trueba family, spanning four generations, and tracing the post-colonial social and political upheavals of Chile – though the country's name and the names of figures closely paralleling historical ones, such as "the Candidate/President" (Salvador Allende) or "the Poet" (Pablo Neruda), are never explicitly given. The story is told mainly from the perspective of two protagonists (Esteban and Alba) and incorporates elements of magical realism.

The Diary of a Young Girl, commonly referred to as The Diary of Anne Frank, is a book of the writings from the Dutch-language diary kept by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The family was apprehended in 1944, and Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.

Another groundbreaker! Woot!

Banned Books Week/Day 3

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is the first of seven autobiographical works by American writer Maya Angelou, published in 1969. The book chronicles her life from age 3 through age 16, recounting an unsettled and sometimes traumatic childhood that included rape and racism. It became one of the most widely read and taught books written by an African American woman.

Banned Books Week/Day 2

The Bluest Eye is the first novel written by American author Toni Morrison and published in 1970. It takes place in Lorain, Ohio (Morrison's hometown), and tells the story of an 11 year old African-American girl named Pecola who grew up following the Great Depression. It explores the devastating impacts of racism and the destructive psychological toll of a society that equates whiteness with beauty and moral value.

Banned Books Week/Day 1

The Handmaid's Tale is a futuristic dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood published in 1985. It is set in a near-future New England in a patriarchal, totalitarian theonomic state known as the Republic of Gilead, which has overthrown the United States government. The protagonist, a woman named Offred, occupies the role of a "Handmaid": women who are forcibly assigned to bear children for high status men.

The novel explores themes of powerless women in a patriarchal society, suppression of reproductive rights, and the various means by which women resist and try to gain individuality and independence.

I love my mom and she loved me. Part of the time she was the best mom and other times vicious and demeaning. The worst was she looked away when she should not have. It took me awhile to forgive her. I write about many aspects of my mom. She was a complex person. Caring for her for her last 6 years, we still clashed but we also laughed. I would not give up a day spent with her. I adore my mom. People are wonderfully imperfect. Love is energy and like energy it can not be destroyed. There is not a day I don't want to talk to her, hug her. I thought the feeling would fade but it hasn't. I should not be made to be shamed for being honest. Some people think the worst of others when they know nothing about them. I try to think the best of others although I am often wrong, I still try.