Bookmarks: Fluency through Novels is a series of companion textbooks to novels that provide teachers with creative exercises and activities to supplement the teaching of a novel. Bookmarks: A Companion Text forKindred is an integrated reading-writing skills text that addresses each of the seven intelligences identified by Howard Gardner: there are tasks and activities for the linguistically, logically/mathematically, kinesthetically, spatially, musically, interpersonally, and intrapersonally intelligent students.
The textbook is designed to be used along with Kindred, a novel by Octavia Butler (published by Beacon Press), which tells the story of a young black woman who disappears from her home in 1970s California to save the life of her white slave-owner ancestor in the early nineteenth century. Through the novel and textbook, students learn about nineteenth-century American life, the origins of slavery in America, the conditions under which slaves lived, the Underground Railroad, important historical figures (like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass), and the civil rights movement of the twentieth century.
Each of the six units begins with a preview of the reading and free writing topics, followed by exercises that improve comprehension and vocabulary building. Students use response journals to think about their personal connection with the novel. They are encouraged to discuss different topics and then write about what they've discussed. The Beyond the Novel section in each unit introduces factual background information in which students learn about slavery and other material mentioned in the novel. Puzzles and out-of-class activities are also included at the end of each unit.

A Companion Text forLike Water for Chocolate provides exercises and activities for ESL students who are reading the English translation of the novel by Laura Esquivel (published by Doubleday). Set during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Like Water for Chocolate is a story about an extended Mexican family and what happens when one daughter is not permitted to marry the man she loves. Cooking and food are central to the story line and help thread the story together.
A Companion TextforLike Water for Chocolate is made up of six units, each covering two chapters in the novel. Every unit contains a preview section, free writing exercises, a short glossary (to help with Spanish words), comprehension quizzes, vocabulary exercises and summarizing exercises, a section devoted to response journals, and topics for discussion. The "Beyond the Novel" section includes facts about U.S. and Mexican history and folk tales. Illustrations throughout the book help to engage students and offer visual support for reading comprehension.

"BookMarks is a moving and revelatory memoir... a work of fiercely intelligent scholarship." - Susan Larson, 

"Erudite and emotional in turns, [BookMarks] is full of truths that appeal to the head and the heart." - Charlotte News Observer"

What are you reading? What books have been important to you? Whether you are interviewing for a job, chatting with a friend or colleague, or making small talk, these questions arise almost unfailingly.  Some of us have stock responses, which may or may not be a fiction of our own making. Others gauge their answers according to who is asking the question. Either way, the replies that we give are thoughtfully crafted to suggest the intelligence, worldliness, political agenda, or good humor that we are hoping to convey.  We form our answers carefully because we know that our responses say a lot.

But what exactly do our answers say? In BookMarks, Karla FC Holloway explores the public side of reading, and specifically how books and booklists form a public image of African Americans. Revealing her own love of books and her quirky passion for their locations in libraries and on bookshelves, Holloway reflects on the ways that her parents guided her reading when she was young and her bittersweet memories of reading to her children. She takes us on a personal and candid journey that considers the histories of reading in children’s rooms, prison libraries, and “Negro” libraries of the early twentieth century, and that finally reveals how her identity as a scholar, a parent, and an African American woman has been subject to judgments that public cultures make about race and our habits of reading.

Holloway is the first to call our attention to a remarkable trend of many prominent African American writers—including Maya Angelou, W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry Louis Gates, Malcolm X, and Zora Neale Hurston. Their autobiographies and memoirs are consistently marked with booklists—records of their own habits of reading. She examines these lists, along with the trends of selection in Oprah Winfrey’s popular book club, raising the questions: What does it mean for prominent African Americans to associate themselves with European learning and culture? How do books by black authors fare in the inevitable hierarchy of a booklist? 

BookMarks provides a unique window into the ways that African Americans negotiate between black and white cultures. This compelling rumination on reading is a book that everyone should add to their personal collections and proudly carry “cover out.”