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 Race & Culture:
-
Lights for Gita
Rachna Gilmore
Gita's family has only recently emigrated from India. Although she misses her relatives and friends, she has already made some friends in her new home. Today, she is looking forward to her favorite holiday: Divali, a festival of lights with fireworks, laughter, and exchanges of sweets. But Gita's plans soon fall apart and she becomes homesick and sad.
-
Like Magic
Elaine Vickers
For three ten-year-old girls, their once simple worlds are starting to feel too big. Painfully shy Grace dreads starting fifth grade now that her best friend has moved away. Jada hopes she'll stop feeling so alone if she finds the mother who left years ago. And Malia fears the arrival of her new baby sister will forever change the family she loves. When the girls each find a mysterious treasure box in their library and begin to fill the box with their own precious things, they start to feel less alone. But it's up to Grace, Jada, and Malia to take the treasures and turn them into something more: true friendship.
-
Like No Other
Una LaMarche
Devorah and Jaxon are stuck in an elevator, where fate leaves them no choice but to make an otherwise forbidden connection. She has never broken the rules of her strict Hasidic upbringing. He is a fun loving nerd who has never had much luck with girls. Though their families would never approve, the teens arrange secret meetings and risk everything.
-
Liliana's Grandmothers
Leyla Torres
Because one of her grandmothers lives down the street and the other in a far away country, Liliana experiences two very different ways of life when she visits them.
-
Listen, Slowly
Thanha Lai
A California girl born and raised, Mai can't wait to spend her vacation at the beach. Instead, though, she has to travel to Vietnam with her grandmother, who is going back to find out what really happened to her husband during the Vietnam War. Mai's parents think this trip will be a great opportunity for their out-of-touch daughter to learn more about her culture. But to Mai, those are their roots, not her own. Vietnam is hot, smelly, and the last place she wants to be. Besides barely speaking the language, she doesn't know the geography, the local customs, or even her distant relatives. To survive her trip, Mai must find a balance between her two completely different worlds.
-
Little Chick and Mommy Cat
Marta Zafrilla
A tale that explores themes of diversity, adoption, and alternative family life follows a little chick who shares a happy relationship with his loving mother, a cat with soft fur, tickling whiskers, and a long beautiful tail.
-
Little & Lion
Brandy Colbert
Suzette returns home to Los Angeles from boarding school and grapples with her bisexual identity when she and her [stepbrother] Lionel fall in love with the same girl, pushing Lionel's bipolar disorder to spin out of control and forcing Suzette to confront her own demons.
-
Living Violet (The Cambion Chronicles, #1)
Jaime Reed
Samara is intrigued by her flirtatious co-worker, Caleb, but his secrets draw Samara into a world that places her loved ones in danger, forcing her to take a risk that will change her life forever.
-
Locomotion
Jacqueline Woodson
In a series of poems, eleven-year-old Lonnie writes about his life, after the death of his parents, separated from his younger sister, living in a foster home, and finding his poetic voice at school.
-
Lost and Found (Amy Hodgepodge, #3)
Kim Wayans Wayans and Kevin Knotts
When her class goes on a wilderness overnight trip, fourth-grader Amy worries about how she will fare since she has never gone camping.
-
Love
Stacy McAnulty
A sweet and simple story about what love is really all about invites children to find love in everyday moments, from baking cookies with a grandparent to receiving notes in a lunchbox.
-
Love, Hate, and Other Filters
Samira Ahmed
Maya Aziz, seventeen, is caught between her India-born parents' world of college and marrying a suitable Muslim boy and her dream world of film school and dating her classmate, Phil, when a terrorist attack changes her life forever.
-
Love Is the Higher Law
David Levithan
Three New York City teens--Claire, Jasper, and Peter--express their reactions to the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and its impact on their lives and the world.
-
Lovely
Jess Hong
Big, small, curly, straight, loud, quiet, smooth, wrinkly. Lovely explores a world of differences that all add up to the same thing: we are all lovely!
-
Lovely War
Julie Berry
In the perilous days of World Wars I and II, the gods hold the fates-- and the hearts-- of four mortals in their hands. They are Hazel, James, Aubrey, and Colette. A classical pianist from London, a British would-be architect-turned-soldier, a Harlem-born ragtime genius in the U.S. Army, and a Belgian orphan with a gorgeous voice and a devastating past. Their story, as told by goddess Aphrodite to her husband, Hephaestus, and her lover, Ares, is filled with hope and heartbreak, prejudice and passion, and reveals that, though War is a formidable force, it's no match for the transcendent power of Love.
-
Love Makes a Family: Portraits of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Parents and their Families
Peggy Gillespie
This volume combines interviews and photographs to document the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered parents and their children. All of the family members speak candidly about their lives, their relationships and how they have dealt with the pressures of homophobia.
-
Loving vs. Virginia: A Documentary Novel of the Landmark Civil Rights Case
Patricia Hruby Powell
Written in blank verse, the story of Mildred Loving, an African American girl, and Richard Loving, a Caucasian boy, who challenge the Viriginia law forbidding interracial marriages in the 1950s.
-
Loving vs. Virginia: Lifting the Ban Against Interracial Marriage
Susan Dudley Gold
Describes the case of Loving v. Virginia including each side's claims, the outcome, and excerpts from the Supreme Court justices' decisions.
-
Loving V. Virginia: Interracial Marriage
Karen Alonso
Explores the Supreme Court case that challenged and eventually overturned Virginia's law forbidding interracial marriages.
-
Lubna and Pebble
Wendy Meddour
Lubna's best friend is a pebble. Pebble always listens to her stories. Pebble always smiles when she feels scared. But when a lost little boy arrives in the World of Tents, Lubna realizes that he needs Pebble even more than she does. This emotionally stirring and stunningly illustrated picture book explores one girl's powerful act of friendship in the midst of an unknown situation.
-
Lucky Beans
Becky Birtha
During the Great Depression, Marshall, an African American boy, uses lessons learned in arithmetic class and guidance from his mother to figure out how many beans are in a jar in order to win her a new sewing machine in a contest.
-
Lucky Girl: A Memoir
Mei-Ling Hopgood
In a true story of family ties, journalist Hopgood, one of the first wave of Asian adoptees to arrive in America, comes face to face with her past when her Chinese birth family suddenly requests a reunion after more than two decades.
-
Lunch Box Dream
Tony Abbott
Told from multiple points of view, a white family on a 1959 road trip between Ohio and Florida, visiting Civil War battlefields along the way, crosses paths with a black family near Atlanta, where one of their children has gone missing.
-
Luv Ya Bunches
Lauren Myracle
Four friends--each named after a flower--navigate the ups and downs of fifth grade. Told through text messages, blog posts, screenplay, and straight narrative.
-
Mackenzie, Lost and Found
Deborah Kerbel
After the death of her mother, Mackenzie and her father move to Israel, where she befriends an American girl dealing with a similar tragedy and begins dating a Palestinian boy, which leads to her involvement with a black-market crime ring.