Books with author Sharon Dennis Wyeth

A young teenager deals with her family's disintegration with the help of a teacher who gives her a summer job working in his garden.Haley's excited about turning 13, but her teenage years start off with a thud when, shortly after her birthday, her mother checks herself into the hospital for severe depression. Her older brother, Otis, is busy with his job selling clothes, and Haley tries to keep her mind off the family problems with her own job, helping a music teacher clean up his backyard garden. As Haley's family life becomes more and more unstable, it's her work and her growing friendship with her employer that sustain her. When Otis gets arrested for selling stolen goods and a social worker takes Haley into a group home, it's her employer she turns to to help her pick up the pieces.

Now in Knopf Paperback--the riveting historical novel of a young black girl's shocking discovery of her true heritage. The first eleven years of Monday de Groot's life have been virtually untouched by slavery. But all that changes when Monday and her mother leave the safety of Madagascar and set sail for New York. The year is 1760, and Monday's uncle has been illegally enslaved by a wealthy Dutch family. Only Monday's mother holds the key to his freedom--and a secret book that could change Monday's life forever.

It is 1760. Monday de Groot and her mother, Lesley, a midwife, sail from their home in Madagascar to New York, to testify on behalf of Lesley's brother Frederick, who has been falsely imprisoned and taken as a slave. Because Lesley has the only papers to prove that Frederick is in fact a free black man, she risks the journey despite its danger for Monday--the potential discovery of the secret of her own birth. While in New York, Monday meets a brother she never knew she had and learns the truth of her heritage. She is not a free African child, as she's always believed, but a child of slaves. The effects of this revelation are astonishing, as Monday comes to grips with her identity and meets her birth mother. Based on historical documents from the 1800s, this compelling story and its remarkable characters will live on in the readers' memory long after the book has been closed.