The Diverse Families bookshelf was created and funded through numerous grants. Due to lack of additional grants and the loss of key personnel, the project has come to an end. We have tremendously enjoyed creating this database and hope that it can help bring readers and books together.
Browse by Health & Disability:
Addiction
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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.
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My Almost Flawless Tokyo Dream Life
Rachel Cohn
On her sixteenth birthday, Elle Zoellner leaves the foster care system to live with the father she never knew in Tokyo, Japan.
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Now Playing: Stoner & Spaz II
Ronald Koertge
High schooler Ben Bancroft, a budding filmmaker with cerebral palsy, struggles to understand his relationship with drug-addict Colleen while he explores a new friendship with A.J., who shares his obsession with movies and makes a good impression on Ben's grandmother.
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Owning It: Stories About Teens with Disabilities
Donald R. Gallo
Presents ten stories of teenagers facing all of the usual challenges of school, parents, boyfriends and girlfriends, plus the additional complications that come with having a physical or psychological disability.
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Punkzilla
Adam Rapp
"Punkzilla" is on a mission to see his older brother "P", before "P" dies of cancer. Still buzzing from his last hit of meth, he embarks on a days-long trip from Portland, Ore. to Memphis, Tenn., writing letters to his family and friends. Along the way, he sees a sketchier side of America and worries if he will make it to see his brother in time.
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Sadie
Courtney Summers
Sadie hasn't had an easy life. Growing up on her own, she's been raising her sister Mattie in an isolated small town, trying her best to provide a normal life and keep their heads above water. But when Mattie is found dead, Sadie's entire world crumbles. After a somewhat botched police investigation, Sadie is determined to bring her sister's killer to justice and hits the road following a few meager clues to find him. When West McCray - a radio personality working on a segment about small, forgotten towns in America - overhears Sadie's story at a local gas station, he becomes obsessed with finding the missing girl. He starts his own podcast as he tracks Sadie's journey, trying to figure out what happened, hoping to find her before it's too late.
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Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity
Rachel Stuckey
Presents information about sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as related social issues and ways of dealing with problems that a person may experience due to one's gender and sexual orientation.
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Six of Crows
Leigh Bardugo
Ketterdam: a bustling hub of international trade where anything can be had for the right price-and no one knows that better than criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker. Kaz is offered a chance at a deadly heist that could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. But he can't pull it off alone... A convict with a thirst for revenge. A sharpshooter who can't walk away from a wager. A runaway with a privileged past. A spy known as the Wraith. A Heartrender using her magic to survive the slums. A thief with a gift for unlikely escapes. Six dangerous outcasts. One impossible heist. Kaz's crew is the only thing that might stand between the world and destruction-if they don't kill each other first.
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Somebody's Daughter
Zara Phillips
A hard-hitting and witty memoir about an adopted woman's lifelong quest to find her birth parents - and her identity. It is the fascinating and revealing account of how a beautiful woman's life has been dominated by her adoption and how it has affected her and those around her.
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Some Kind of Happiness
Claire Legrand
Finley Hart is sent to her grandparents' house for the summer, but her overwhelmingly sad days continue until she escapes into her writings, which soon turn mysteriously real as she realises she must save this magical world in order to save herself.
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Still Waters
Ash Parsons Parsons
High-schooler Jason, who lives with a drunk, abusive father at home, hopes to earn enough money to escape with his younger sister, Janie, by being tough at school, but the stakes grow ever more dangerous and soon even his fists and ability to think on his feet are not enough to keep his head above water.
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Stoner & Spaz
Ronald Koertge
A troubled youth with cerebral palsy struggles toward self-acceptance with the help of a drug-addicted young woman.
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The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza
Shaun David Hutchinson
Elena, the first scientifically confirmed virgin birth, acquires the ability to heal by touch at age sixteen, the same year that people start disappearing in beams of light, causing her to wonder if she is bringing about the Apocalypse.
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The Art of Starving
Sam J. Miller
Matt hasn’t eaten in days. His stomach stabs and twists inside, pleading for a meal, but Matt won’t give in. The hunger clears his mind, keeps him sharp—and he needs to be as sharp as possible if he’s going to find out just how Tariq and his band of high school bullies drove his sister, Maya, away. Matt’s hardworking mom keeps the kitchen crammed with food, but Matt can resist the siren call of casseroles and cookies because he has discovered something: the less he eats the more he seems to have...powers. The ability to see things he shouldn’t be able to see. The knack of tuning in to thoughts right out of people’s heads. Maybe even the authority to bend time and space. So what is lunch, really, compared to the secrets of the universe? Matt decides to infiltrate Tariq’s life, then use his powers to uncover what happened to Maya. All he needs to do is keep the hunger and longing at bay. No problem. But Matt doesn’t realize there are many kinds of hunger...and he isn’t in control of all of them.
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The Beauty That Remains
Ashley Woodfolk
Autumn, Shay, and Logan, whose lives intersect in complicated ways, each lose someone close to them and must work through their grief.
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The Edification of Sonya Crane
J. D. Guilford
Transferred to a predominantly black high school in Atlanta, Sonya Crane, passing as biracial, hides her real identity when she is accepted into a clique of friends she never had before until Tandy Herman, the most popular girl in school, threatens to expose her.
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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.
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The Mighty Heart of Sunny St. James
Ashley Herring Blake
When Sunny St. James receives a new heart, she decides to set off on a New Life Plan: 1) do awesome amazing things she could never do before; 2) find a new best friend; and 3) kiss a boy for the first time. Her New Life Plan seems to be racing forward, but when she meets her new best friend Quinn, Sunny questions whether she really wants to kiss a boy at all. With the reemergence of her mother, Sunny begins a journey to becoming the new Sunny St. James
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The Music of What Happens
Bill Konigsberg
It is summer in Phoenix, and seventeen-year-old Maximo offers to help Jordan, a fellow student in high school, with the food truck that belonged to Jordan's deceased father, and which may be the only thing standing between homelessness for Jordan and his mom; the boys are strongly attracted to each other, but as their romance develops it is threatened by the secrets they are hiding--and by the racism and homophobia of those around them.
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The One Where the Kid Nearly Jumps to His Death and Lands in California
Mary Hershey
Alastair, a thirteen-year-old who calls himself "Stump" because of his amputated leg, must face a summer at his wealthy but estranged father's beach house in Los Angeles, where he meets his stepmother, falls in love with a teenaged soap opera star, and decides to train for a race with a former Olympic swim coach.
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The Porcupine of Truth
Bill Konigsberg
Carson Smith isn't thrilled to be spending the summer with her estranged dad in Billings, Montana. But then he meets Aisha Stinson, the most beautiful girl he's ever seen. And the smartest. And the funniest. They connect like he never has with anyone. Also she's a lesbian. So there's that. Carson's dad is still bitter about the disappearance of his dad more than thirty years earlier. When Carson and Aisha discover a box full of cards from his grandfather, some of them recent, they realize the old man is still out there somewhere. What are two bored teenagers in the middle of nowhere to do? So Carson and Aisha begin a journey with no destination, to find a man who wanted to be lost, in an unreliable Dodge Neon, with one very prickly mascot. And what comes next is an extraordinary, enlightening, hilarious, inspiring, complete and utter mindblower of a road trip that will transform both their lives.
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The Sorta Sisters
Adrian Fogelin
In Florida, Anna Casey lives with what she hopes is the last in a long line of foster mothers, and Mica Delano lives with her father on their small boat, and when the two of them begin corresponding, they discover they have a lot in common.
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The Summer of the Gypsy Moths
Sara Pennypacker
A foster child named Angel and twelve-year-old Stella, who are living with Stella's great-aunt Louise at the Linger Longer Cottage Colony on Cape Cod, secretly assume responsibility for the vacation rentals when Louise unexpectedly dies and the girls are afraid of being returned to the foster care system.
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The Window
Michael Dorris
When ten-year-old Rayona's Native American mother enters a treatment facility, her estranged father, a Black man, finally introduces her to his side of the family, who are not at all what she expected.
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This Side of Home
Reneé Watson
Twins Nikki and Maya Younger always agreed on most things, but as they head into their senior year they react differently to the gentrification of their Portland, Oregon neighborhood and the new--white--family that moves in after their best friend and her mother are evicted.