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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The Game of Love and Death

Martha Brockenbrough

In Seattle in 1937 two seventeen-year-olds, Henry, who is white, and Flora, who is African-American, become the unwitting pawns in a game played by two immortal figures, Love and Death, where they must choose each other at the end, or one of them will die.
the GENDER book

Mel Reiff Hill, Jay Mays, and Robin Mack

A fun and colorful resource that illustrates the beautiful diversity of gender.
The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue

Mackenzi Lee

Henry "Monty" Montague was bred to be a gentleman. His passions for gambling halls, late nights spent with a bottle of spirits, or waking up in the arms of women or men, have earned the disapproval of his father. His quest for pleasures and vices have led to one last hedonistic hurrah as Monty, his best friend and crush Percy, and Monty's sister Felicity begin a Grand Tour of Europe. When a reckless decision turns their trip abroad into a harrowing manhunt, it calls into question everything Monty knows, including his relationship with the boy he adores.
The Girl from Everywhere (The Girl from Everywhere, #1)

Heidi Heilig

Sixteen-year-old Nix has sailed across the globe and through centuries aboard her time-traveling father's pirate ship, but when he gambles with her very existence, it all may come to an end.
The Grave

James Heneghan

Thirteen-year-old Tom, an unhappy foster child in Liverpool, falls into a massive open grave and is transported to Ireland in 1847, where he finds himself in the midst of the deadly potato famine.
The Gravity of Us

Phil Stamper

When his volatile father is picked to become an astronaut for NASA's mission to Mars, seventeen-year-old Cal, an aspiring journalist, reluctantly moves from Brooklyn to Houston, Texas, and looks for a story to report, finding an ally (and crush) in Leon, the son of another astronaut.
The Great Gilly Hopkins

Katherine Paterson

Watch out world! The Great Gilly Hopkins is looking for a home. She's a foster kid who's been angry, lonely, and hurting for so long that's she's always ready for a fight. Be on the lookout for her best barracuda smile, the one she saves for well-meaning social workers. Watch out for her most fearful look, a cross between Dracula and Godzilla, used especially to scare shy foster brothers.
The Great Quarterback Switch

Matt Christopher

Twelve-year-old Michael, confined to a wheelchair after an accident, uses mental telepathy to communicate football plays to his quarterback twin brother Tom, then suddenly finds himself on the field in his brother's place.
The Great Shelby Holmes

Elizabeth Eulberg

Nine-year-old Shelby Holmes, the best detective in her Harlem neighborhood, and her new easy-going friend from downstairs, eleven-year-old John Watson, become partners in a dog-napping case.
The Grooming of Alice

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

During the summer between eighth and ninth grades, Alice and her friends Pamela and Elizabeth decide to improve themselves through exercise.
The Hidden World of Changers #3 The Power Within

H.K. Varian

Darren, Fiona, Mack, and Gabriella are Changers, a magical line of shapeshifters that can transform into mythological creatures, from werewolves and selkies to lightning birds and spirit foxes. They still have a lot to learn when it comes to their powers, but the kids are finally showing some progress fighting as a team, and the First Four think they're ready for a new mission. Young Changers in the area have been mysteriously disappearing, and it's up to the kids to figure out who-or what's behind it. But ever since his parents announced their divorce, Darren has been having a rough time coping-and his lightning abilities are going haywire.
The Homeless

Gail B. Stewart

Presents first-person accounts of individuals and families who are living as homeless persons in America's cities.
The House on Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros

For Esperanza, a young girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, life is an endless landscape of concrete and run-down tenements, and she tries to rise above the hopelessness.
The Kat Sinclair Files #2 Graveyard Slot

Michelle Schusterman

Kat and her friends investigate ghosts in South America, and she finds herself involved in some mysteries that she might not want to unravel.
The Key to Every Thing

Pat Schmatz

For eleven-year-old Tash, Cap’n Jackie isn’t just the elderly next-door neighbor — she’s family. When she disappears, only Tash holds the key that might bring her back.Tash didn’t want to go to camp, didn’t want to spend the summer with a bunch of strangers, didn’t want to be separated from the only two people she has ever been able to count on: her uncle Kevin, who saved her from foster care, and Cap’n Jackie, who lives next door. Camp turns out to be pretty fun, actually, but when Tash returns home, Cap’n Jackie is gone. And Tash needs her — the made-up stories of dolphin-dragons, the warm cookies that made everything all right after a fight, the key Cap’n Jackie always insisted had magic in it. The Captain always said all Tash had to do was hold it tight and the magic would come. Was it true? Could the key bring Cap’n Jackie back?
The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy

Mackenzie Lee

A year after an accidentally whirlwind grand tour with her brother Monty, Felicity Montague has returned to England with two goals in mind—avoid the marriage proposal of a lovestruck suitor from Edinburgh and enroll in medical school. However, her intellect and passion will never be enough in the eyes of the administrators, who see men as the sole guardians of science. But then a window of opportunity opens—a doctor she idolizes is marrying an old friend of hers in Germany. Felicity believes if she could meet this man he could change her future, but she has no money of her own to make the trip. Luckily, a mysterious young woman is willing to pay Felicity’s way, so long as she’s allowed to travel with Felicity disguised as her maid. In spite of her suspicions, Felicity agrees, but once the girl’s true motives are revealed, Felicity becomes part of a perilous quest that leads them from the German countryside to the promenades of Zurich to secrets lurking beneath the Atlantic.
The Legend of Korra: Ruins of the Empire Part One

Michael Dante DiMartina

On the eve of its first elections, the Earth Kingdom finds its future endangered by its past. Even as Kuvira stands trial for her crimes, vestiges of her imperial ambitions threaten to undermine the nation's democratic hopes. But when Korra, Asami, Mako, and Bolin don't all see eye-to-eye as to the solution, drastic measures will be taken to halt a new march to war!
The Length of a String

Elissa Brent Weissman

Imani knows exactly what she wants as her big bat mitzvah gift: to find her birth parents. She loves her family and her Jewish community in Baltimore, but she has always wondered where she came from, especially since she's black and almost everyone she knows is white. Then her mom's grandmother--Imani's great-grandma Anna--passes away, and Imani discovers an old journal among her books. It's Anna's diary from 1941, the year she was twelve and fled Nazi-occupied Luxembourg alone, sent by her parents to seek refuge in Brooklyn, New York. Anna's diary records her journey to America and her new life with an adoptive family of her own. And as Imani reads the diary, she begins to see her family, and her place in it, in a whole new way.
The Letter Q: A Queer Writers' Notes to Their Younger Selves

Sarah Moon

If you received a letter from your older self, what do you think it would say? What do you wish it would say? That the boy you were crushing on in History turns out to be gay too, and that you become boyfriends in college? That the bully who is making your life miserable will one day become so insignificant that you won't remember his name until he shows up at your book signing? In this anthology, sixty-three award-winning authors such as Michael Cunningham, Amy Bloom, Jacqueline Woodson, Gregory Maguire, David Levithan, and Armistead Maupin make imaginative journeys into their pasts, telling their younger selves what they would have liked to know then about their lives as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender people. Through stories, in pictures, with bracing honesty, these are words of love and understanding, reasons to hold on for the better future ahead. They will tell you things about your favorite authors that you never knew before. And they will tell you about yourself.
The Liberation of Gabriel King

K. L. Going

In Georgia during the summer of 1976, Gabriel, a white boy who is being bullied, and Frita, an African American girl who is facing prejudice, decide to overcome their many fears together as they enter fifth grade.
The Line Tender

Kate Allen

Wherever the sharks led, Lucy Everhart's marine-biologist mother was sure to follow. In fact, she was on a boat far off the coast of Massachusetts, collecting shark data when she died suddenly. Lucy was seven. Since then Lucy and her father have kept their heads above water—thanks in large part to a few close friends and neighbors. But June of her twelfth summer brings more than the end of school and a heat wave to sleepy Rockport. On one steamy day, the tide brings a great white—and then another tragedy, cutting short a friendship everyone insists was "meaningful" but no one can tell Lucy what it all meant. To survive the fresh wave of grief, Lucy must grab the line that connects her depressed father, a stubborn fisherman, and a curious old widower to her mother's unfinished research on the Great White's return to Cape Cod. If Lucy can find a way to help this unlikely quartet follow the sharks her mother loved, she'll finally be able to look beyond what she's lost and toward what's left to be discovered.
The Lions of Little Rock

Kristin Levine

In 1958 Little Rock, Arkansas, painfully shy twelve-year-old Marlee sees her city and family divided over school integration, but her friendship with Liz, a new student, helps her find her voice and fight against racism.
The Lost Hero (The Heroes of Olympus, #1)

Rick Riordan

Jason, Piper, and Leo, three students from a school for "bad kids," find themselves at Camp Half-Blood, where they learn that they are demigods and begin a quest to free Hera, who has been imprisoned by Mother Earth herself.
The Lost Marble Notebook of Forgotten Girl and Random Boy

Maria Jaskulka

Forgotten Girl is going through the most difficult time of her life-- the breakup of her parents, and her mom's resulting depression. She meets Random Boy, a hot guy who, like her, feels like an outcast and secretly writes poetry to deal with everything going on in his life. They come from opposite sides of the tracks, yet they find understanding in each other when they lay bare their life stories through the poetry they write and share with each other.
The Lottery Plus One

Emma Donoghue

Once upon a time, two couples with Jamaican, Mohawk, Indian, and Scottish ethnic roots won the lottery and bought a big house where all of them, four adults and seven adopted and biological children, could live together in harmony--but change is inevitable, especially when a disagreeable grandfather comes to stay.