Frank Carlson Library

"The stunning and provocative coming-of-age memoir about Sarah Valentine's childhood as a white girl in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, and her discovery that her father was a black man. At the age of 27, Sarah Valentine discovered that she was not, in fact, the white girl she had always believed herself to be. She learned the truth of her paternity: that her father was a black man. And she learned the truth about her own identity: mixed race. And so Sarah...

"When an innocent walk in the woods with her dog turns up yet another corpse, Leigh begins to get worried. It's bad enough that the victim is a client of her agency. It's even worse that he is the same unscrupulous real estate developer who's been conniving to bulldoze her Aunt Bess's homestead. And it would be a whole lot better for everyone in Leigh's family if her cousin Cara's husband hadn't brawled with the man in front of a churchful of witnesses...

The Cranmers seemed fated to own the house at 3406 Brownsville Road. As a young boy, Bob had been drawn to the property, and, just when the family decided to move back to Brentwood, it went up for sale. Without a second thought, they purchased the house that Bob had always dreamed of owning. But soon, the family began experiencing strange phenomena--objects moving on their own, ghostly footsteps, unsettling moaning sound--that gradually increased...

"Frank Santoro faces a simple but sad reality: His parents, once high-school sweethearts, now don't speak to each other--even though they work in the same building. Trying to understand, Santoro searches through his memories and builds a portrait of their lives together and apart, past and present. Using markers, pencils, scissors, and tape, drawing in vivid colors and exuberant lines, he brings to life the mundane and the extraordinary: his parents'...

A thirteen-year-old black girl from Pittsburgh describes what it is like to grow up in a tough inner-city neighborhood.

In 1950s Pittsburgh, a Black garbage collector named Troy Maxson--bitter that baseball's color barrier was only broken after his own heyday in the Negro Leagues--is prone to taking out his frustrations on his loved ones.