{"title":"Jess Mowry","description":"Jess Mowry is the bestselling author of Way Past Cool and other books for children and young adults. According to the New York Times, \"Few authors capture the slang and terrors of inner-city streets the way Mr. Mowry does. And few write with such a sense of mission and fury.\" Jess Mowry makes his home in Oakland, California.","products":[{"product_id":"babylon-boyz-paperback","title":"Babylon Boyz - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eIn this tense teen novel, three struggling boys in embattled West Oakland are faced with a choice sure to change their lives--for better or worse.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eDante, Pook, and Wyatt are eighth graders in a rundown school in West Oakland, California, plagued by guns, gangs, drugs, and violence, all overseen by inept or indifferent teachers. The three friends are used to only being able to react to the world around them, dodging blows rather than forging their own paths. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eDante, thirteen, was born to a crack-addicted mother and needs an expensive heart operation if he hopes to reach thirty. Pook is newly fourteen and, handsome and muscular, outcasted for being gay, with dreams of medical school he can't afford. Wyatt, thirteen, is awesomely fat and cursed with being smart in a stupid place. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThey feel like they're headed for a dead in until they find a suitcase full of cocaine and suddenly face an excruciating decision. Selling the coke means escape. But it also means adding to the crack epidemic that has already destroyed their community. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eWhat price are they willing to pay for freedom.","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51445049163999,"sku":"9780689825927","price":10.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/KWAYXRSiNw9780689825927.webp?v=1790211133"},{"product_id":"drawing-from-life-paperback","title":"Drawing From Life - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eMeet Jerry Mathers, who, though resembling the middle-aged \"Beaver,\" bears no other relation, having been born in the 1970s when that illusion of American life was almost a decade dead. His mother, widowed by the Vietnam War, endured many years as a Woolworth's clerk to bring Jerry up in a \"nice neighborhood,\" enabling him to go to college and fulfill his dreams of being an artist... at least thus far sufficient enough to still believe in them.However, the present is 2013, and Jerry finds himself 39, still only an underpaid teacher of Art at a private school in Oakland, California, his dreams apparently slipping away... as his mother is also slipping away in a nursing home he can't afford. And, resolving years before that the road to romance was closed to him -- perhaps by a long-fallen bridge -- he faces a dark and lonely future.His fifteenth year of teaching begins, as have all his others, in a gloomy Victorian mansion bequeathed for the education of youth by Miss Minerva Morrison, who passed away in 1901 at the age of 97, and whose portrait hangs in the shadowy foyer. By film and ghost story stereotypes the huge house looks like it should be haunted, but though there have been \"sightings\" -- presumably of Miss Morrison's ghost -- Jerry has never been haunted... at least until this year.But why? Could it be that one of his new students, a remarkable boy named Gabriel Graves, divinely gifted in drawing from life and able to see the souls of his subjects -- but also the first black youth to ever enroll in the school -- has awakened a sleeping racial hatred from over a hundred years in the past? A hatred that may be deadly to both teacher and student.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67841097269471,"sku":"9780998557908","price":22.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/hXiGWM9RqR9780998557908.webp?v=1790812280"},{"product_id":"the-bridge-paperback-9","title":"The Bridge - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eThirteen-year-old Bilal Taimur was raised as a Muslim but is questioning his faith... as well as many other things that boys of his age often question. His middle-class parents were killed in a car wreck when he was ten, and he's been living with his devoutly Muslim grandfather in West Oakland, California, where he's learned the rules of inner city life... vastly different from life in the 'burbs. His best friend was murdered in a drive-by, and Bilal testified against the gang members, sending them to prison, and is now under a death sentence from the remainder of the gang. There is no witness protection for kids like Bilal, though a pair of good Oakland cops help him beyond the call of duty, and Bilal goes to live with his cousin - Quentin Tanner, also thirteen - in a small rural town in the Sacramento River Delta. Though less than two hours by bus from Oakland, it's like another planet to Bilal, and again he must learn to adapt and make friends in a strange new environment. Meanwhile, the gang find out where he is, but it's also an alien environment for them, where friends are really friends to the end.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67841456177375,"sku":"9780998076751","price":22.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/6JyrSWPKu69780998076751.webp?v=1790823133"},{"product_id":"when-all-goes-bright-paperback","title":"When All Goes Bright - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eNot quite in the center of Africa lies a tiny land called Kiwanja whose people have lived in undisturbed peace for many thousands of years. But, times have changed in the outside world: satellites spy on everyone because anything that isn't possessed is a threat to those who don't posses it. But one thing that hasn't changed is war.Thirteen-year-old Dakota is the son of Nathi, a Kiwanjian bush pilot who flies an ancient C-47. Dakota is skilled in take-offs and landings from dirt airstrips in the dead of night, skimming hilltops to avoid radar, and dodging enemy aircraft. Dakota has only known war in his life, war in which children kill other children commanded by adult \"generals.\" One side wants to rule the land to \"bring it into the future,\" the other claims to be fighting for freedom and ancient traditional ways of life, but both bring only terror and death to the innocent people caught in the middle. Meanwhile, in the United States, Nicole Neale, a divorced single-parent with an almost-thirteen-year-old son named Zack, fights a more civilized war to keep her job with a small corporation that manufactures many things from boys' action-figures to military uniforms... though much of the work is done by children in dirty, third-world sweatshops. Will winning her war in boardrooms save her son from what seems like enslavement to video games, material values, the lure of money, and possibly drugs? And, why should her company, subsidized by the U.S. Government, have any interest in a tiny African country? The only thing Nicole knows about Kiwanja is that its people make beautiful boots.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67841458340063,"sku":"9780998076799","price":22.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/weBAxm-Mkp9780998076799.webp?v=1790823151"},{"product_id":"phat-acceptance-paperback","title":"Phat Acceptance - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eSome might say 14-year-old Brandon Williams is an over-privileged snowflake. He lives in a million-dollar house overlooking the ocean in Santa Cruz, California, gets a weekly allowance equal to the take-home pay of many service industry workers, and has gone to a private, all-white school from Kindergarten through eighth grade. Health-nazis call him \"obese,\" but to most normal people he's simply chubby, and handsome by Caucasian standards. Brandon should be happy - or at least think he is - but he's not. Like many young teens he's sure there must be a \"there\" somewhere that's better than the present \"here,\" and he's tried to find it in fantasy games. He's also tried to dull his angst in various chemical ways, and wasted a year of his youth staying high. Brandon hopes to be a writer and use words as weapons to fight world's wrongs. Being who he is and living where he does, he's never experienced discrimination or hate based on appearance or race. Despite the protests of his liberal-minded and loving, but career-oriented and somewhat distant parents, Brandon decides to attend public high school. But his first day is a reality shock as he discovers what public education in the U.S. is all about... pounding just enough knowledge and mainstream values into kids' empty skulls so they can become productive Proles. Since no one knows him, he naturally falls in with the outcasts, which include Travis White, one of the school's few black students and the fattest at five-hundred pounds. There is also Bosco Donatello, a chubby world-class surfer dude, though indifferent to his fame and seemingly oblivious to the present as if he's been transported through time from 1963. As the story progresses, Brandon struggles with the question of whether a person can empathize with the suffering of others unless he or she has suffered. Along these lines he discovers that most of what he \"knows\" about black people - and fat people - is only what he's been taught. Phat Acceptance is a mix of issues, including consumerism, advertising, propaganda, xenophobia, and how kids are brainwashed from the time they first turn on a TV into buying what they're told to buy, wearing what they're told to wear, eating what they're told to eat, looking how they're told to look - which now includes weighing what they're told to weigh - and hating who they're told to hate. It also illustrates how the \"war on childhood obesity\" gives haters a group of people whom it's socially acceptable to hate, as well as how sheep-like most people are in accepting how \"unhealthy\" they are because they're being told they are by a health and fitness industry with multi-billion dollar profits. The result is a new religion of \"health\" and a holy war against those who won't worship.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67842980610271,"sku":"9780998557922","price":22.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/DmKcJkmMCj9780998557922.webp?v=1790844712"},{"product_id":"knights-crossing-paperback","title":"Knights Crossing - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe year is 1860 in the United States of America. The industrial revolution has brought railroads for fast transportation. Steamships cross the seas, and riverboats ply the waterways. Telegraph provides instant communication; and machines are beginning to replace much dreary human labor. But, thirteen-year-old Skyler Knight returns from a year of schooling in New Orleans to the tiny Louisiana bayou town of Knight's Crossing - named after his family - to find that nothing seems to have changed. This is mostly a relief: there were too many new ideas in New Orleans; too much change happening too fast for his liking. Skyler, raised on his family's huge plantation, was brought up to believe that black people were animals. Intelligent animals, yes, but certainly not human beings. Yet, Skyler is beginning to wonder about that, to at least subconsciously question the morality of slavery. These are dangerous notions for a boy who will inherit a hundred slaves. But, something new HAS come to Knight's Crossing. After getting off the train, Skyler encounters two black boys of around his age. One is Cartwright, a handsome, muscular boy who was purchased to be a companion for a wealthy plantation-owner's son. The other is an enormously fat boy named Loki - called Lucky - who belongs to Seth Franklin, a little-known and reclusive man who owns a small plantation deep in the bayou. There are rumors that Franklin is too kind to his slaves; that he's allowed them to get fat and lazy. ...And worse, \"uppity,\" and Lucky seems to confirm all these rumors. Although at thirteen Skyler has supposedly learned all he is expected to know about life, it's during the next year that his real education begins.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67842983821535,"sku":"9780998557984","price":20.25,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/fZRWDmkebI9780998557984.webp?v=1790844734"},{"product_id":"voodoo-dawgz-paperback","title":"Voodoo Dawgz - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eEvil always lingers in a land where men have enslaved other men. Such evil is discovered by Kody Carver, a 13-year-old African-American boy who spends his summers in the Old French Quarter of New Orleans. There with Raney Tanner, his alligator-wrestling bayou cousin, he helps his magical Aunt Simone with Voodoo ceremonies for tourists in his aunt's haunted house. By day, Kody and Raney cruise the steamy streets of the Old French Quarter, where other kids sell Voodoo charms and vampire teeth, or dance for money. By night, Kody and Raney become Voodoo boys in loincloths and bones. The audience thinks it's all showtime, but a lot of the magic is real. But, when Kody is almost gunned-down by an eight-year-old named Newton, who was sent out to kill to prove himself worthy of membership in a kid-gang called The Skeleton Crew, Kody discovers the real gang leader has been dead for almost two-hundred years. Kody and Raney set out to save the young gang members from death - or worse - with help from an undead boy.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67917028032735,"sku":"9780998076775","price":24.28,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/AF3tiW8GGn9780998076775.webp?v=1791035586"}],"url":"https:\/\/blackandbarhe.com\/collections\/jess-mowry.oembed","provider":"Black \u0026 Barhe Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}