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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War of the Eagles

Eric Walters

During World War II near Prince Rupert, British Columbia, Jed comes to better understand and take pride in his British and native Tsimshian ancestry through caring for an injured eagle at a military fort and losing his Japanese Canadian best friend to an internment camp.
Water Balloon

Audrey Vernick

A warm debut novel about friendship and first love, from a popular picture-book author. Marley's life is as precarious as an overfull water balloonone false move and everything will burst. Her best friends are pulling away from her, and her parents, newly separated, have decided she should spend the summer with her dad in his new house, with a job she didn't ask for and certainly doesn't want. On the upside is a cute boy who loves dogs as much as Marley does ... but young love has lots of opportunity for humiliation and misinterpreted signals. Luckily Marley is a girl who trusts her instincts and knows the truth when she sees it, making her an immensely appealing character and her story funny, heartfelt, and emotionally true.
Waterbound

Jane Stemp

In a futuristic society sixteen-year-old Gem discovers that a group of handicapped people who call themselves the Waterbound live hidden beneath the City.
Wave Good-Bye

Francess Lantz

Rae hasn't been her usual self lately, and no one at camp seems to know why. Her crabby attitude is starting to affect everyone, including her best friend, Luna. When Luna catches Rae precariously riding the piers, she decides to confront her friend head-on. Finally Rae admits the truth: her parents have decided to separate, and even worse -- her father's company is relocating him to Chicago. Now Rae feels torn between staying in southern California with her overbearing mother and moving with her father to an unfamiliar city. Though leaving would ease the tension between Rae and her mom, it would mean the end of Rae's surfing, too. Will Luna be able to convince Rae to stick around or will she lose her best friend forever?
Way to Go

Tom Ryan

Danny thinks he must be the only seventeen-year-old guy in Cape Breton-in Nova Scotia, maybe-who doesn't have his life figured out. His buddy Kierce has a rule for every occasion, and his best friend Jay has bad grades, no plans, and no worries. Danny's dad nags him about his post-high-school plans, his friends bug him about girls and a run-in with the cops means he has to get a summer job. Worst of all, he's keeping a secret that could ruin everything.
We Are the Youth

Diana Scholl and Laurel Golio

We are the youth is an ongoing photographic journalism project chronicling the individual stories of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth in the United States. Through portraits, by photographer Laurel Golio, and as-told-to personal essays, by writer Diana Scholl, this book captures the incredible strength and diversity of LGBT youth.
W.E.B. Du Bois (Biographies of Biracial Achievers)

Jim Whiting

Highlights the life and accomplishments of the African American scholar and leader who devoted himself to gaining equality for his people.
We Don't Look Like Our Mom and Dad

Harriet Langsam Sobol

A photo-essay on the life of the Levin family, an American couple and their two Korean-born adopted sons, ten-year-old Eric and eleven-year-old Joshua.
Welcome to Bordertown

Holly Black and Ellen Kushner

Stories and poems set in the urban land of Bordertown, a city on the edge of the faerie and human world, populated by human and elfin runaways.
We Were Here

Matt de la Pena

Haunted by the event that sentences him to time in a group home, Miguel breaks out with two unlikely companions and together they begin their journey down the California coast hoping to get to Mexico and a new life.
What are You?: Voices of Mixed-Race Young People

Pearl Fuyo Gaskins

Many young people of racially mixed backgrounds discuss their feelings about family relationships, prejudice, dating, personal identity, and other issues.
Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

Kathleen Collins

Now available in Ecco's Art of the Story series: a never-before-published collection of stories from a brilliant yet little known African American artist and filmmaker-a contemporary of revered writers including Toni Cade Bambara, Laurie Colwin, Ann Beattie, Amy Hempel, and Grace Paley-whose prescient work has recently resurfaced to wide acclaim. Humorous, poignant, perceptive, and full of grace, Kathleen Collins's stories masterfully blend the quotidian and the profound in a personal, intimate way, exploring deep, far-reaching issues-race, gender, family, and sexuality-that shape the ordinary moments in our lives. In "The Uncle," a young girl who idolizes her handsome uncle and his beautiful wife makes a haunting discovery about their lives. In "Only Once," a woman reminisces about her charming daredevil of a lover and his ultimate-and final-act of foolishness. Collins's work seamlessly integrates the African-American experience in her characters' lives, creating rich, devastatingly familiar, full-bodied men, women, and children who transcend the symbolic, penetrating both the reader's head and heart. Both contemporary and timeless, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love' is a major addition to the literary canon, and is sure to earn Kathleen Collins the widespread recognition she is long overdue.
What Happened to Goodbye

Sarah Dessen

Following her parents' bitter divorce as she and her father move from town to town, seventeen-year-old Mclean reinvents herself at each school she attends until she is no longer sure she knows who she is or where she belongs.
What Hearts

Bruce Brooks

After his mother divorces his father and remarries, Asa's sharp intellect and capacity for forgiveness help him deal with the instabilities of his new world.
What Jaime Saw

Carolyn Coman

Having fled to a family friend's hillside trailer after his mother's boyfriend tried to throw his baby sister against a wall, nine-year-old Jamie finds himself living an existence full of uncertainty and fear.
What Momma Left Me

Renée Watson

After the death of their mother, thirteen-year-old Serenity Evans and her younger brother go to live with their grandparents, who try to keep them safe from bad influences and help them come to terms with what has happened to their family. Includes recipe for red velvet cake.
What the Night Sings

Vesper Stamper

Liberated from Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp in 1945, Gerta has lost her family and everything she knew. Without her Papa, her music, or even her true identity, she must move past the task of surviving and onto living her life. Gerta meets Lev, a fellow teen survivor, and Michah, who helps Jews reach Palestine. With a newfound Jewish identity she never knew she had, and a return to the life of music she thought she lost forever, Gerta must choose how to build a new future.
What We Keep is Not Always What Will Stay

Amanda Cockrell

Angie never used to think much about God—until things started getting strange. Like the statue of St. Felix, her secret confidant, suddenly coming off his pedestal and talking to her. And Jesse Francis, sent home from Afghanistan at age nineteen with his leg blown off. Now he's expected to finish high school and fit right back in. Is God even paying attention to this? Against the advice of St. Felix (who knows a thing or two about war), Angie falls for Jesse—who's a lot deeper than most high school guys. But Jesse is battling some major demons. As his behavior starts to become unpredictable, and even dangerous, Angie finds herself losing control of the situation. And she's starting to wonder...can one person ever make things right for someone else?
What Would Joey Do?

Jack Gantos

Joey's dad just roared into town on a motorcycle, his mom is chasing her ex-husband away with a broomstick, and his grandma's camped out on the couch behind a plastic shower curtain. What's more, Joey's chihuahua has been dognapped, and his mom insists that he be homeschooled with a mean blind girl and her super-religious mother. Welcome to Joey's world. With his new self-assumed role as "Mr. Helpful," Joey's on a mission to make everything and everyone better. Can Joey accomplish all this or will his wild, wired behavior spin him out of control all over again?
When Andy's Father Went to Prison

Martha Whitmore Hickman

When Andy's father is sent to prison for robbery and the family moves to be near him, Andy is afraid of what the kids at his new school will think.
When Dad Killed Mom

Julius Lester

When Jenna and Jeremey's father kills their artistic mother, they struggle to slowly rebuild a functioning family.
When Friendship Followed Me Home

Paul Griffin

Ben Coffin has never felt like he fits in. A former foster kid, he keeps his head down at school to avoid bullies and spends his afternoons reading sci-fi books at the library. But all that changes when he finds a scruffy abandoned dog named Flip and befriends the librarian's daughter, Halley. For the first time, Ben starts to feel like he belongs in his own life. Then everything changes, and suddenly Ben is more alone than ever. But with a little help from Halley's magician father, Ben discovers his place in the world and learns to see his own magic through others' eyes.
When Heaven Fell

Carolyn Marsden

When her grandmother reveals that the daughter that she had given up for adoption is coming from America to visit her Vietnamese family, nine-year-old Binh is convinced that her newly-discovered aunt is wealthy and will take care of all the family's needs.
When She Was Good

Norma Fox Mazer

The death of her abusive, manipulative older sister prompts seventeen-year-old Em to remember their unpleasant life together, with their parents and then later on their own.
When She Was White: The True Story of a Family Divided by Race

Judith Stone

During the worst years of official racism in South Africa, the story of one young girl came to symbolize the injustice, corruption, and arbitrary nature of apartheid. Born in 1955 to a pro-apartheid white couple, Sandra Laing was officially registered and raised as a white child. But at a school for whites, she was mercilessly persecuted because of her dark skin and frizzy hair. Her parents attributed her appearance to an interracial union far back in family history. Their neighbors, however, thought Mrs. Laing had committed adultery with a black man. The family was shunned. When Sandra was ten, she was reclassified as "coloured." As a teenager, she eloped with a black man, her parents disowned her, and having known only the privileged world of the whites, she chose to begin again in a poor, all-black township, where life was a desperate struggle against a legal system designed to enslave.