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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Ten Days and Nine Nights: An Adoption Story
Yumi Heo
A young girl eagerly awaits the arrival of her newly-adopted sister from Korea, while her whole family prepares.
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That's My Daddy and Pop
Tina Rella
That's My Daddy and Pop is the heartwarming story of Jessie, a little girl with two fathers. Jessie doesn't realize that her family isn't 'typical' until a girl in her class asks about her mom. Jessie's Daddy and Pop tell her about the amazing journey they took to adopt her.
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The Accidental Adventures of India McAllister
Charlotte Agell
India, an unusual nine-and-a-half-year-old living in small-town Maine, has a series of adventures which bring her closer to her artist-mother, strengthen her friendship with a neighbor boy, and help her to accept the man for whom her father moved away.
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The Barefoot Book of Children
David Dean, Tessa Strickland, and Kate DePalma
The Barefoot Book of Children takes its readers on a visual trek across the globe, where they discover that -- despite our different clothes and homes and languages -- we are more alike than different.
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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 Best Single Mom in the World
Mary Zisk
A girl tells how her mother decided to become a single parent and traveled overseas to adopt her and describes their happy life as a family.
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The Blending of Foster and Adopted Children into a Family
Heather Lehr Wagner and Marvin Rosen
Explores issues facing families confronting the challenges created by adoption and foster care, and identifies steps members of blended families can take to ensure that they have a strong foundation.
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The Child in the Fathers' Hearts: A Story of Adoption
Paul Janson
A picture book designed to be read to adopted children of gay parents. The child is adopted by two fathers. The opening comments are about the author's own philosophy of children, that all children begin in the heart of their parents however they come to be a part of a family.
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The Cruel Prince
Holly Black
Jude was seven years old when her parents were murdered and she and her two sisters were stolen away to live in the treacherous High Court of Faerie. Ten years later, Jude wants to belong there, despite her mortality. But many of the fey despise humans. Especially Prince Cardan, the youngest and wickedest son of the High King. To win a place at the Court, she must defy him--and face the consequences. In doing so, she becomes embroiled in palace intrigues and deceptions, discovering her own capacity for bloodshed. As civil war threatens, Jude will need to risk her life in a dangerous alliance to save her sisters, and Faerie itself.
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The Day We Met You
Phoebe Koehler
Mom and Dad recount the exciting day when they adopted their baby.
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The Family Book
Todd Parr
Represents a variety of families, some big and some small, some with only one parent and some with two moms or dads, some quiet and some noisy, but all alike in some ways and special no matter what.
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The Family Fletcher Takes Rock Island
Dana Alison Levy
Summertime brings the Fletcher Family back to Rock Island where the good times never end, but this summer the boys' favorite lighthouse is all boarded up and with the help from their new neighbors, the Garcia girls, the boys are determined to find out what is really happening with their lighthouse and saving it, no matter what the cost.
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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.
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The Great Big Book of Families
Mary Hoffman
Features illustrations and descriptions of different types of families and how their lives are similar and different.
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The Inexplicable Logic of My Life
Benjamin Alire Saenz
A story set on the American border with Mexico, about family and friendship, life and death, and one teen struggling to understand what his adoption does and doesn't mean about who he is.
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The Last True Love Story
Brendan Kiely
Hendrix and Corrina bust Hendrix's grandfather out of assisted living, and leave LA for New York in pursuit of freedom, truth, and love.
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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.
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The Little Green Goose
Adele Sansone and J. Alison James
Mr. Goose finds an abandoned egg, hatches it, and raises a peculiar green-skinned long-tailed chick, who worries about his identity but comes to recognize that he has a loving parent.
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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.
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The Lotterys 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.
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The Misadventures of the Family Fletcher
Dana Alison Levy
Relates the adventures of a family with two fathers, four adopted boys, and a variety of pets as they make their way through a school year, Kindergarten through sixth grade, and deal with a grumpy new neighbor.
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The Mulberry Bird: An Adoption Story
Anne Braff Brodzinsky
Although she loves her baby very much, a young mother bird gives him up for adoption because she is unable to give him the home which he needs.
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The Nerdiest, Wimpiest, Dorkiest I Funny Ever (I Funny #6)
James Patterson and Chris Grabenstein
Comedian Jamie Grimm can't help feeling like he's reached the top--he has his own smash hit TV show and he's won a national funny-kid competition. But now he's taking his fame and fortune to international levels by competing in the upcoming world kid comic contest! Will Jamie prove that he's the funniest kid on earth--or does he stand (or sit!) to lose his crown?
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The New Goldilocks and the Three Bears: Mama Bear, Mommy Bear, and Baby Bear
Beth McMurray
The new Goldilocks and the Three Bears helps celebrate the diversity of loving families. This version follows Mama Bear, Mommy Bear, and Baby Bear as they encounter the timeless character of Goldilocks.
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The Popularity Papers: Research for the Social Improvement and General Betterment of Lydia Goldblatt & Julie Graham-Chang
Amy Ignatow
Two best friends embark on a project to study the behavior and taste of the popular girls at their elementary school so that by the time they get to middle school they too will be in the right crowd. Novel appears in the form of a scrapbook.