9-12 Books | University of Central Florida

This collection contains materials from the DIVerse Families bibliography organized Grades 9-12.

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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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.
Whale Talk

Chris Crutcher

Intellectually and athletically gifted, TJ, a multiracial, adopted teenager, shuns organized sports and the gung-ho athletes at his high school until he agrees to form a swimming team and recruits some of the school's less popular students.
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.
What Comes After

Steve Watkins

When her veterinarian father dies, sixteen-year-old Iris Wight must move from Maine to North Carolina where her Aunt Sue spends Iris's small inheritance while abusing her physically and emotionally, but the hardest to take is her mistreatment of the farm animals.
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 If It's Us

Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera

Told in two voices, when Arthur, a summer intern from Georgia, and Ben, a native New Yorker, meet it seems like fate, but after three attempts at dating fail they wonder if the universe is pushing them together or apart.
What is Real

Karen Rivers

Dex Pratt's life has been turned upside down: his parents have divorced, his mother has remarried, and his father attempts suicide and fails. Dex returns to their small town to care for him. However, he isn't prepared for his father's grow-op or his rotting rented house.
What She Left Behind

Tracy Bilen

Sixteen-year-old Sara's mother goes missing before she and Sara can move to a new town to escape Sara's physically abusive father.
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 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 Something Feels Wrong: A Survival Guide about Abuse for Young People

Deanna S. Pledge

Provides checklists, journaling ideas, and other positive ways of dealing with being physically, sexually, and/or emotionally abused, emphasizing the importance of talking about what has happened and getting help.
When the Black Girl Sings

Bil Wright

Adopted by white parents and sent to an exclusive Connecticut girls' school where she is the only black student, fourteen-year-old Lahni Schuler feels like an outcast, particularly when her parents separate, but after attending a local church where she hears gospel music for the first time, she finds her voice.
When We Were Good

Suzanne Sutherland

The year 2000 isn't starting out too well for Toronto high school senior Katherine Boatman. Not only has her oldest friend ditched her for yet another boyfriend, her beloved grandmother died on New Year's Eve, leaving a void of goodness in her life that Katherine's not sure how to fill. While overwhelmed with sadness and self-doubt, Katherine unexpectedly finds new love, both for Toronto's underground music scene and for her would-be savior: a straight-edge, loudmouthed misfit named Marie.
When We Were Outlaws: A Memoir of Love and Revolution

Jeanne Córdova

A sweeping memoir, a raw and intimate chronicle of a young activist torn between conflicting personal longings and political goals. When We Were Outlaws offers a rare view of the life of a radical lesbian during the early cultural struggle for gay rights, Women's Liberation, and the New Left of the 1970s. Brash and ambitious, activist Jeanne Córdova is living with one woman and falling in love with another, but her passionate beliefs tell her that her first duty is "to the revolution"--To change the world and end discrimination against gays and lesbians. Trying to compartmentalize her sexual life, she becomes an investigative reporter for the famous, underground L.A. Free Press and finds herself involved with covering the Weather Underground, Angela Davis; exposing neo-Nazi bomber Captain Joe Tomassi, and befriending Emily Harris of the Symbionese Liberation Army. At the same time she is creating what will be the center of her revolutionary lesbian world: her own newsmagazine, The Lesbian Tide, destined to become the voice of the national lesbian feminist movement. By turns provocative and daringly honest, Cordova renders emblematic scenes of the era--ranging from strike protests to utopian music festivals, to underground meetings with radical fugitives--with period detail and evocative characters. For those who came of age in the '70s, and for those who weren't around but still ask 'What was it like?' --Outlaws takes you back to re-live it. It also offers insights about ethics, decision making and strategy, still relevant today. With an introduction by renowned lesbian historian Lillian Faderman, When We Were Outlaws paints a vivid portrait of activism and the search for self-identity, set against the turbulent landscape of multiple struggles for social change that swept hundreds of thousands of Americans into the streets.
White Oleander

Janet Fitch

When Ingrid, a brilliant but obsessed poet, is sent to prison for murder, her only child Astrid must find a place for herself as she journeys through a series of foster homes. With determination and humor, Astrid confronts the challenges of loneliness and poverty, and strives to learn who a motherless child in an indifferent world can become.
White Rabbit

Caleb Roehrig

Rufus Holt is having the worst night of his life. It begins with the reappearance of his ex-boyfriend, Sebastian―the guy who stomped his heart out like a spent cigarette. Just as Rufus is getting ready to move on, Sebastian turns up out of the blue, saying they need to "talk." Things couldn’t get worse, right? Then Rufus gets a call from his sister April, begging for help. He and Sebastian find her, drenched in blood and holding a knife beside the dead body of her boyfriend, Fox Whitney. April swears she didn’t kill Fox. Rufus knows her too well to believe she’s telling him the whole truth, but April has something he needs. Her price is his help. Now, with no one to trust but the boy he wants to hate yet can’t stop loving, Rufus has one night to clear his sister’s name . . . or die trying.
Wide Awake

David Levithan

In the not-too-distant future, when a gay Jewish man is elected president of the United States, sixteen-year-old Duncan examines his feelings for his boyfriend, his political and religious beliefs, and tries to determine his rightful place in the world.
Wild Beauty

Anna-Marie McLemore

Love grows such strange things. Anna-Marie McLemore's debut novel The Weight of Feathers garnered fabulous reviews and was a finalist for the prestigious YALSA Morris Award, and her second novel, When the Moon was Ours, was longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Young People's Literature. Now, in Wild Beauty, McLemore introduces a spellbinding setting and two characters who are drawn together by fate―and pulled apart by reality. For nearly a century, the Nomeolvides women have tended the grounds of La Pradera, the lush estate gardens that enchant guests from around the world. They’ve also hidden a tragic legacy: if they fall in love too deeply, their lovers vanish. But then, after generations of vanishings, a strange boy appears in the gardens. The boy is a mystery to Estrella, the Nomeolvides girl who finds him, and to her family, but he’s even more a mystery to himself; he knows nothing more about who he is or where he came from than his first name. As Estrella tries to help Fel piece together his unknown past, La Pradera leads them to secrets as dangerous as they are magical in this stunning exploration of love, loss, and family.
Wildthorn

Jane Eagland

Seventeen-year-old Louisa Cosgrove is locked away in the Wildthorn Hall mental institution, where she is stripped of her identity and left to wonder who has tried to destroy her life.
Will

Maria Boyd

Seventeen-year-old Will's behavior has been getting him in trouble at his all-boys school in Sydney, Australia, but his latest punishment, playing in the band for a musical production, gives him new insights into his fellow students and helps him cope with an incident he has tried to forget.
Willful Machines

Tim Floreen

In a near-future America, a sentient computer program named Charlotte has turned terrorist, but Lee Fisher, the closeted son of an ultraconservative President, is more concerned with keeping his Secret Service detail from finding out about his developing romance with Nico, the new guy at school. But when the spider-like robots that roam the school halls begin acting even stranger than usual, Lee realizes he is Charlotte's next target.
Will Grayson, Will Grayson

David Levithan and John Green

When two teens, one gay and one straight, meet accidentally and discover that they share the same name, their lives become intertwined as one begins dating the other's best friend, who produces a play revealing his relationship with them both.