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:
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The American Wei
Marion Hess Pomeranc
When Wei Fong loses his first tooth while going to his family's naturalization ceremony, many soon-to-be Americans join in the search.
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The Arrival
Shaun Tan
In this wordless graphic novel, a man leaves his homeland and sets off for a new country, where he must build a new life for himself and his family.
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The Astonishing Color of After
Emily X.R. Pan
After her mother's suicide, grief-stricken Leigh Sanders travels to Taiwan to stay with grandparents she never met, determined to find her mother who she believes turned into a bird.
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The Aunt in Our House
Angela Johnson
When The Aunt comes to live with them, the entire family enjoys her company and helps her forget about the home she has lost.
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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 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 Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir
Thi Bui
Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family's daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves.
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The Black Canary
Jane Louise Curry
As the child of two musicians, twelve-year-old James has no interest in music until he discovers a portal to seventeenth-century London in his uncle's basement, and finds himself in a situation where his beautiful voice and the fact that he is biracial might serve him well.
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The Blood of Olympus (The Heroes of Olympus, #5)
Rick Riordan
Though the Greek and Roman crewmembers of the Argo II have made progress in their many quests, they still seem no closer to defeating the earth mother, Gaea. Her giants have risen -- all of them -- and they're stronger than ever. They must be stopped before the Feast of Spes, when Gaea plans to have two demigods sacrificed in Athens. She needs their blood -- the blood of Olympus -- in order to wake. The demigods are having more frequent visions of a terrible battle at Camp Half-Blood. The Roman legion from Camp Jupiter, led by Octavian, is almost within striking distance. Though it is tempting to take the Athena Parthenos to Athens to use as a secret weapon, the friends know that the huge statue belongs back on Long Island, where it "might" be able to stop a war between the two camps. The Athena Parthenos will go west; the Argo II will go east. The gods, still suffering from multiple personality disorder, are useless. How can a handful of young demigods hope to persevere against Gaea's army of powerful giants? As dangerous as it is to head to Athens, they have no other option. They have sacrificed too much already. And if Gaea wakes, it is game over.
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The Blossoming Universe of Violet Diamond
Brenda Woods
A biracial girl finally gets the chance to meet the African American side of her family."
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The Breakaways
Cathy G. Johnson
Quiet, sensitive Faith starts middle school already worrying about how she will fit in. To her surprise, Amanda, a popular eighth grader, convinces her to join the school soccer team, the Bloodhounds. Having never played soccer in her life, Faith ends up on the C team, a ragtag group that’s way better at drama than at teamwork. Although they are awful at soccer, Faith and her teammates soon form a bond both on and off the soccer field that challenges their notions of loyalty, identity, friendship, and unity. The Breakaways from Cathy G. Johnson is a raw, and beautifully honest graphic novel that looks into the lives of a diverse and defiantly independent group of kids learning to make room for themselves in the world.
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The Buddha of Suburbia
Hanif Kureishi
Karim is the son of an assimilated Indian businessman in London. When his Zen-obsessed father becomes the guru of the swinging suburban scene, Karim is swept up into the world of theater, art, drugs, rock and roll and sexual exploration.
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The Cardboard Kingdom
Chad Sell
Welcome to a neighborhood of kids who transform ordinary boxes into colorful costumes, and their ordinary block into cardboard kingdom. This is the summer when sixteen kids encounter knights and rogues, robots and monsters—and their own inner demons—on one last quest before school starts again. In the Cardboard Kingdom, you can be anything you want to be—imagine that! The Cardboard Kingdom was created, organized, and drawn by Chad Sell with writing from ten other authors: Jay Fuller, David DeMeo, Katie Schenkel, Kris Moore, Molly Muldoon, Vid Alliger, Manuel Betancourt, Michael Cole, Cloud Jacobs, and Barbara Perez Marquez. The Cardboard Kingdom affirms the power of imagination and play during the most important years of adolescent identity-searching and emotional growth.
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The Case for Loving: The Fight for Interracial Marriage
Selina Alko
Imagine not being able to marry the person you loved, just because they were of a race different from your own. This is the story of one brave family: Mildred Loving, Richard Perry Loving, and their three children. It is the story of how Mildred and Richard fell in love, and got married in Washington D.C. When they moved back to their hometown in Virginia, they were arrested for violating that state's law against interracial marriage. The Lovings refused to allow their children to get the message that their parents' love was wrong and so they fought the unfair law, taking their case all the way to the Supreme Court.
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The Christmas Truck
J. B. Blankenship
When celebrating a special Christmas tradition things go awry. Papa, Dad, their amazing kid, and one fabulous grandmother work together and implement a plan to save Christmas for a child they have never met.
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The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother
James McBride
Who is Ruth McBride Jordan? A self-declared "light-skinned" woman evasive about her ethnicity, yet steadfast in her love for her twelve children. James McBride, journalist, musician and son, explores his mother's past, as well as his own upbringing and heritage, in a poignant and powerful memoir.
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The Color Purple
Alice Walker
This feminist novel about an abused and uneducated black woman's struggle for empowerment was praised for the depth of its female characters and for its eloquent use of black English vernacular.
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The Colors of Us
Karen Katz
Seven-year-old Lena and her mother observe the variations in the color of their friends' skin, viewed in terms of foods and things found in nature.
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The Cook's Family
Laurence Yep
As her parents' arguments become more frequent, Robin looks forward to the visits that she and her grandmother make to Chinatown, where they pretend to be an elderly cook's family, giving Robin new insights into her Chinese heritage.
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The Cottage in the Woods
Katherine Coville
Presents the story of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" as told by young Teddy's governess, who came to work at the Vaughn family "cottage" shortly before a golden-haired girl, ragged and dirty, entered the home and soon became a beloved foster child, until evil characters tried to take her away.
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The Crayon Box that Talked
Shane DeRolf
Although they are many different colors, the crayons in a box discover that when they get together they can appreciate each other and make a complete picture.
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The Day Santa Stopped Believing in Harold
Maureen Fergus
Santa Claus stops believing that Harold, a small child, exists, and comes up with a plan to find out once and for all if Harold is real.
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The Day War Came
Nicola Davies
The day war came there were flowers on the windowsill and my father sang my baby brother back to sleep. Imagine if, on an ordinary day, after a morning of studying tadpoles and drawing birds at school, war came to your town and turned it to rubble. Imagine if you lost everything and everyone, and you had to make a dangerous journey all alone. Imagine that there was no welcome at the end, and no room for you to even take a seat at school. And then a child, just like you, gave you something ordinary but so very, very precious. In lyrical, deeply affecting language, Nicola Davies’s text combines with Rebecca Cobb’s expressive illustrations to evoke the experience of a child who sees war take away all that she knows.
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The Day You Begin
Jacqueline Woodson
Other students laugh when Rigoberto, an immigrant from Venezuela, introduces himself but later, he meets Angelina and discovers that he is not the only one who feels like an outsider.
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The Deaf Musicians
Pete Seeger and Paul Dubois Jacobs
Lee, a jazz pianist, has to leave his band when he begins losing his hearing, but he meets a deaf saxophone player in a sign language class and together they form a snazzy new band.