6-8 Books | University of Central Florida

This collection contains materials from the DIVerse Families bibliography organized by Grades 6-8.

DIVerse Families is a comprehensive bibliography that demonstrates the growing diversity of families in the United States. This type of bibliography provides teachers, librarians, counselors, adoption agencies, children/young adults, and especially parents and grandparents needing to empower their children with materials that reflect their families.

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Legend of Korra: Turf Wars Part Three

Michael Dante DiMartino

When Asami is kidnapped, Korra sets out to the Spirit Wilds to find her. Now teeming with dark spirits influenced by the half spirit-half human Tokuga, the landscape is more dangerous than ever before. The two women must trust in each other and work together if they are to make it out alive.
Legend of Korra: Turf Wars Part Two

Dante DiMartino

Recovering from the fight and furious for revenge, Triple Threats member Tokuga solidifies his ties with the duplicitous Wonyong. Meanwhile, when Republic City's housing crisis reaches its peak, Zhu Li sets her sights on the biggest public figure in the city--President Raiko--in a bid for the presidency! With her friend's success, the future of the spirit portal, and the wellbeing of Republic City's citizens at stake, can Korra remain neutral and fulfill her duties as the Avatar?
Leonardo's Hand

Warwick Downing

Finally in a foster home with a caring family, Nard, a thirteen-year-old orphan with only one hand, invents a human-powered flying machine with the assistance of the 500-year-old hand of Leonardo da Vinci.
Let's Get This Straight: The Ultimate Handbook for Youth with LGBTQ Parents

Tina Fakhrid-Deen

Offers children, teens, and adults with one or more gay, bisexual, or transgender parents advice on how they can deal with the challenges they might face, build healthy relationships with their parents, address discrimination, build a strong sense of self-esteem, and reduce the isolation and shame they might feel.
Let's Talk About Love

Claire Kann

In this young adult novel, Alice, afraid of explaining her asexuality, has given up on finding love until love finds her.
Let's Talk About Racism

Bruce Sanders

Uses a question and answer format to explain racism and why some people are treated unfairly because of their skin color or religion and discusses ways of dealing with this issue.
Letters from the Heart

Annie Bryant

A family history project for school is giving the Beacon Street Girls a lot to think about -- especially Avery. She's got three families: her mother and brothers at home, her father in Colorado, and the birth mother she never really knew. But family is an uncomfortable subject for Maeve. Her parents have just separated, and she doesn't want to talk about it to anyone, not even her best friends in the world, the BSG. Can a bundle of old letters make Maeve see her family in a new light and give her something to share with the Beacon Street Girls?
LGBTQ+ Athletes Claim the Field: Striving for Equality

Kirstin Cronn-Mills

In 2015, the world watched as soccer star Abby Wambach kissed her wife after the US women's World Cup victory. Milwaukee Brewers' minor league first baseman David Denson came out as gay. And Caitlyn (born Bruce) Jenner, an Olympic decathlete, came out as transgender. It hasn't always been this way. Many great athletes have stayed in the closet their whole lives, or at least until retirement. Social attitudes, institutional policies, and laws are slow to change, but they are catching up. Together, athletes, families, educators, allies, and fans are pushing for competitive equity so that every athlete, regardless of identity, can have the opportunity to play at their very best.
Liberty

Kirby Larson

In 1940s New Orleans, Fish Elliot is a polio-survivor with a knack for inventing and building things, and his African American neighbor Olympia is a girl with a talent for messing things up, but they are united in an effort to save a starving stray dog they call Liberty--and when Liberty is caged by a nasty farmer, they find an unlikely ally in a German prisoner of war, Erich, who is not much older than the two children.
Like Magic

Elaine Vickers

For three ten-year-old girls, their once simple worlds are starting to feel too big. Painfully shy Grace dreads starting fifth grade now that her best friend has moved away. Jada hopes she'll stop feeling so alone if she finds the mother who left years ago. And Malia fears the arrival of her new baby sister will forever change the family she loves. When the girls each find a mysterious treasure box in their library and begin to fill the box with their own precious things, they start to feel less alone. But it's up to Grace, Jada, and Malia to take the treasures and turn them into something more: true friendship.
Like No Other

Una LaMarche

Devorah and Jaxon are stuck in an elevator, where fate leaves them no choice but to make an otherwise forbidden connection. She has never broken the rules of her strict Hasidic upbringing. He is a fun loving nerd who has never had much luck with girls. Though their families would never approve, the teens arrange secret meetings and risk everything.
Like Water

Rebecca Podos

When her father is diagnosed with Hungtington's disease, eighteen-year-old Vanni abandons her plan to flee her small New Mexico hometown after high school graduation and instead spends the summer keeping herself busy with part-time jobs and boys, but that changes after she meets Leigh, whose friendship dares Vanni to ask herself big questions and make new plans.
Listen, Slowly

Thanha Lai

A California girl born and raised, Mai can't wait to spend her vacation at the beach. Instead, though, she has to travel to Vietnam with her grandmother, who is going back to find out what really happened to her husband during the Vietnam War. Mai's parents think this trip will be a great opportunity for their out-of-touch daughter to learn more about her culture. But to Mai, those are their roots, not her own. Vietnam is hot, smelly, and the last place she wants to be. Besides barely speaking the language, she doesn't know the geography, the local customs, or even her distant relatives. To survive her trip, Mai must find a balance between her two completely different worlds.
Little Chicago

Adam Rapp

Little Chicago opens in the office of Children's Services, where eleven-year-old Blacky Brown is being interviewed by a social worker who is trying to determine what has happened to him. At first, Blacky's emotions are blocked, but then he reveals that he has been sexually abused by his mother's boyfriend, and is released into his mother's custody. Thus begins an alternately harrowing and hopeful story of a brave boy's attempts to come to grips with a grim reality. Mary Jane, a classmate who is similarly ostracized, tries to help Blackie, but he soon takes refuge instead in the gun that he buys.
Lives Turned Upside Down: Homeless Children in Their Own Words and Photographs

Jim Hubbard

Two girls and two boys, ages nine to twelve, talk about their own personal experiences with homelessness and life in shelters.
Living in Secret

Cristina Salat

Amelia's mother helps her run away from her father who has custody and establish a new home and identity in San Francisco with her mother's girlfriend.
Lizard Radio

Pat Pat Schmatz

Fifteen-year-old bender Kivali, who was deposited on Earth as an infant by mysterious saurians, must discover her true identity in a futuristic society run by an all-powerful government.
Locomotion

Jacqueline Woodson

In a series of poems, eleven-year-old Lonnie writes about his life, after the death of his parents, separated from his younger sister, living in a foster home, and finding his poetic voice at school.
Long Way Down

Jason Reynolds

In Long Way Down, a young boy's brother has just died from a gunshot wound and through brief, powerful poems the reader gets the story of the brothers, the story of urban families, the story of a neighborhood, and the story of the impulse for revenge and the strength it takes to resist that. Terrifically powerful and searingly sad, this is Jason Reynolds continuing to explore some deep truths for young people.
Louisiana's Song

Kerry Madden

Set in the Appalachia in 1963, Livy Two has come to terms with the fact that her father is a changed man after being in a coma and so now, along with her eleven-year-old sister, Louisiana, she must find a way to take care of their father and their large mountain family.
Love Drugged

James Klise

Fifteen-year-old Jamie is dismayed by his attraction to boys, and when a beautiful girl shows an interest in him, he is all the more intrigued by her father's work developing a drug called Rehomoline.
Love in the Corner Pocket

Marlene Perez

Chloe, a Laguna Beach, California, high school student, sorts out questions about her parents' separation and her own friendships and love life as she gets ready to compete in a pool tournament.
Love Is the Higher Law

David Levithan

Three New York City teens--Claire, Jasper, and Peter--express their reactions to the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and its impact on their lives and the world.
Loving vs. Virginia: A Documentary Novel of the Landmark Civil Rights Case

Patricia Hruby Powell

Written in blank verse, the story of Mildred Loving, an African American girl, and Richard Loving, a Caucasian boy, who challenge the Viriginia law forbidding interracial marriages in the 1950s.
Loving V. Virginia: Interracial Marriage

Karen Alonso

Explores the Supreme Court case that challenged and eventually overturned Virginia's law forbidding interracial marriages.