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 Family Relationship:
Adoption
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The Possibility of Somewhere
Julia Day
Although on opposite sides of every social hierarchy their friends and families can imagine, including race, class, and social status, popular Ash Gupta, the son of wealthy, immigrant Asian-Indian parents, and anti-social Eden Moore, whose biggest goal is to escape her family's poverty and trailer-park existence, grow close as they compete to become class valedictorian.
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The Red Blanket
Eliza Thomas
Tells the story of a single woman who goes to China to adopt a baby. Based on the author's life.
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The Red Thread: An Adoption Fairy Tale
Grace Lin
A sad king and queen find joy and happiness after a mysterious red thread leads them to a baby waiting to be adopted.
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The Secret Ingredient
Stewart Lewis
After a chance meeting with a psychic, Olivia, a teen cook living in Los Angeles with her two dads and misfit brother, finds a vintage cookbook with handwritten notes inside and pieces together a story that turns a normal summer into a search for her birth mother.
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These Dreams of You
Steve Erickson
The election of the country's first black president prompts failed novelist Zan Nordhoc and his wife to solve the mystery surrounding their adopted black daughter's life, an epic journey that helps a struggling family salvage its bonds.
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The Story I'll Tell
Nancy Tupper Ling
A mother weaves a magical web of tales to explain how her child came to be a part of the family.
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The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane
Lisa See
A thrilling new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa See explores the lives of a Chinese mother and her daughter who has been adopted by an American couple. Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. There is ritual and routine, and it has been ever thus for generations. Then one day a jeep appears at the village gate--the first automobile any of them have seen--and a stranger arrives. In this remote Yunnan village, the stranger finds the rare tea he has been seeking and a reticent Akha people. In her biggest seller, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, See introduced the Yao people to her readers. Here she shares the customs of another Chinese ethnic minority, the Akha, whose world will soon change. Li-yan, one of the few educated girls on her mountain, translates for the stranger and is among the first to reject the rules that have shaped her existence. When she has a baby outside of wedlock, rather than stand by tradition, she wraps her daughter in a blanket, with a tea cake hidden in her swaddling, and abandons her in the nearest city. After mother and daughter have gone their separate ways, Li-yan slowly emerges from the security and insularity of her village to encounter modern life while Haley grows up a privileged and well-loved California girl. Despite Haley's happy home life, she wonders about her origins; and Li-yan longs for her lost daughter. They both search for and find answers in the tea that has shaped their family's destiny for generations. A powerful story about a family, separated by circumstances, culture, and distance, Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane paints an unforgettable portrait of a little known region and its people and celebrates the bond that connects mothers and daughters.
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The Tummy Mummy
Michelle Madrid-Branch
The true love that inspires adoption is revealed as a birthmother opens her heart, while adoptive parents open their arms for a child.
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The White Swan Express
Elaine M. Aoki and Jean Davies Okimoto
Across North America, people in four different homes prepare for a special trip to China, while four baby girls in China await their new adoptive parents.
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They Chose Me: A Story of Grandparent Adoption
Rhonda Beheler
A little boy learns for the first time how he came to live with and be adopted by his grandparents.
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The Year of the Baby
Andrea Cheng
Anna and her best friends Laura and Camille return in an engaging new story. Anna's family has adopted a new baby from China, but her new sister is not thriving and refuses to eat. When Anna and her friends are assigned a science experiment in school, they decide to use the assignment as a way to help Baby Kaylee.
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The Year of the Fortune Cookie
Andrea Cheng
Eleven-year-old Anna takes a trip to China and learns more about herself and her Chinese heritage.
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Three Names of Me
Mary Cummings
A girl adopted from China explains that her three names--one her birth mother whispered in her ear, one the babysitters at her orphanage called her, and one her American parents gave her--are each an important part of who she is. Includes scrapbooking ideas for other girls adopted from China.
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Three Pennies
Melanie Crowder
In San Francisco, eleven-year-old Marin desperately searches for her birthmother knowing time is running out before she is adopted, and discovers for the first time in her life what it feels like to be truly wanted by someone.
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Through Moon and Stars and Night Skies
Ann Turner
A boy who came from far away to be adopted by a couple in this country remembers how unfamiliar and frightening some of the things were in his new home, before he accepted the love to be found there.
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Tillmon County Fire
Pamela Ehrenberg
In tiny Tillmon County, where it seems like nothing ever happens, a mysterious fire rocks the lives of the teenagers who live there. Who set the fire that night, and more importantly, who owns the reasons behind it? As the story unfolds, the lines between truth and fiction, motive and happenstance, guilt and innocence blur. This novel-in-stories is told sequentially in the voices of its disparate cast of characters: a frustrated adoptee, a gay teenager, a big-city kid who is new in town and wishes he were back in Manhattan, a pregnant store clerk, and a boy with autism who is more at the center of events than he imagines.
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Touch Blue
Cynthia Lord
When the state of Maine threatens to shut down their island's one-room schoolhouse because of dwindling enrollment, eleven-year-old Tess, a strong believer in luck, and her family take in a trumpet-playing foster child, to increase the school's population.
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Train to Somewhere
Even Bunting
In the late 1800s, Marianne travels westward on the Orphan Train in hopes of being placed with a caring family.
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Transracial Adoption: Children and Parents Speak
Constance Pohl
Explores the issues related to interracial and international adoptions, using interviews with black, biracial, Asian, and Hispanic young people who were adopted into white or biracial families.
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Trouper
Meg Kearney
Trooper, a three-legged dog, remembers his life as a stray, before he was adopted.
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Two Dads: A Book About Adoption
Carolyn Robertson
Having two dads is double the fun! Many families are different. This family has two dads. A beautifully illustrated, affirming story of life with two dads, written from the perspective of their adopted child.
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Waiting for May
Janet Morgan Stoeke
A young boy looks forward to the day when a new sister, who will be adopted from China, joins his family.
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Waiting for Normal
Leslie Connor
Twelve-year-old Addie tries to cope with her mother's erratic behavior and being separated from her beloved stepfather and half-sisters when she and her mother go to live in a small trailer by the railroad tracks on the outskirts of Schenectady, New York.
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We Adopted You, Benjamin Koo
Linda Walvoord
Nine-year-old Benjamin Koo Andrews, adopted from Korea as an infant, describes what it's like to grow up adopted from another country.
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We are Adopted
Jennifer Moore-Mallinos
An adopted girl welcomes her baby brother whom her parents have also adopted from Russia, and she describes the reasons for adoption, what life is like as an adopted child, and her interactions with other adopted children.