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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Bait
Alex Sanchez
Diego keeps getting into trouble because of his explosive temper until he finally finds a probation officer who helps him get to the root of his anger so that he can stop running from his past.
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Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope
Nikki Grimes
When David asks his mother about the man on television, she tells him the story of Barack Obama, discussing his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, his parents' divorce, and his desire to help others.
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Bat 6
Virginia Euwer Wolff
In small town, post-World War Oregon, twenty-one sixth-grade girls recount the story of an annual softball game, during which one girl's bigotry comes to the surface. Set in a small Oregon town just after World War II, this is the powerful tale of a community shattered by its reaction to two young newcomers, Aki and Shazam. Told from 21 different points of view, "Bat 6" explores the subject of Japanese-American racial prejudice after the war. A Japanese American girl who has just spent 6 years in an internment camp meets a bitter girl whose father was killed in Pearl Harbor, and the two become rivals in baseball in this story narrated by the members of the opposing teams.
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Beginnings: How Families Come to Be
Virginia Kroll
Parents and children discuss how their families came to be, covering birth families, adoptive families, two-parent families, and single parent families.
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Behind You
Jacqueline Woodson
After fifteen-year-old Jeremiah is mistakenly shot by police, the people who love him struggle to cope with their loss as they recall his life and death, unaware that 'Miah is watching over them.
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Ben and the Sudden Too-Big Family
Colby Rodowsky
Until now, ten-year-old Ben has believed that life is made up of "all right" and "not all right" stuff, but when his father remarries and the couple adopts a Chinese baby, he wonders which kind of stuff will prevail.
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Benny Doesn't Like to Be Hugged
Zetta Elliott
A little girl uses rhyming verse to describe the unique traits of her autistic friend. Benny likes trains and cupcakes without sprinkles, but he can also be fussy sometimes. The narrator doesn’t mind, however, because “true friends accept each other just the way they are.” A gentle story encouraging children to appreciate and accept our differences.
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Betty Before X
Ilyasah Shabazz and Renée Watson
Raised by her aunt until she is six, Betty, who will later marry Malcolm X, joins her mother and stepfamily in 1940s Detroit, where she learns about the civil rights movement.
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Between Us Baxters
Bethany Hegedus
The story of twelve-year-old Polly, a poor white Southern girl whose close friendship with Timbre Ann, a middle-class black teen, puts both families in danger. As white supremacists set fire to black businesses, Polly struggles to cope with the implications for her family and to understand the true meaning of friendship. Polly's sense of justice threatens to upset the status quo in her small town.
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Be Who You Are
Todd Parr
Picture book encouraging kids to be proud of what makes them unique, where they come from, and how they express themselves and see the world.
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Beyoncé: Singer-Songwriter, Actress, and Record Producer
Chuck Bednar
Presents the life and career of the pop singer, from her childhood and early career with Destiny's Child to her solo career in music and motion pictures.
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Billie of Fish House Lane
Meredith Sue Willis
A twelve-year-old girl attempts to understand and accept her affluent, white cousin while living in a multiracial, eccentric family.
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Billy and Belle
Sarah Garland
A newborn baby and the exciting confusion of Pet Day at school combine to make a very special day for Billy and Belle.
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Black and White
Eric Walters
Thomas meets Denyse after he watches her amazing skills at basketball. As the two become friends, they endure name-calling, cruel glances, and hurtful comments because of the difference of their skin.
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Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America
Ibi Zoboi
Edited by National Book Award finalist Ibi Zoboi and featuring some of the most acclaimed best-selling black authors writing for teens today - Black Enough is an essential collection of captivating stories about what it's like to be young and black in America.
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Black is Brown is Tan
Arnold Adoff
Describes in verse a family with a brown-skinned mother, white-skinned father, two children, and their various relatives.
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Black Like Me
John Howard Griffin
The Deep South of the late 1950's was another country: a land of lynchings, segregated lunch counters, whites-only restrooms, and a color line etched in blood across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. White journalist John Howard Griffin, working for the black-owned magazine Sepia, decided to cross that line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man.
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Black Means…
Barney Grossman
Records the feelings of New York elementary school children toward the word "black."
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Blackout
John Rocco
When a busy family's activities come to a halt because of a blackout, they find they enjoy spending time together and not being too busy for once.
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Black, White and Tan
Nicole C. Mullen
Nicole C. Mullen’s book reminds children “Together we are beautiful!” God loves all the kids in his family―no matter what color they are.
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Black, White & Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self
Rebecca Walker
In a memoir about the power of race to share one's personal identity, the daughter of Jewish father and African-American mother recalls her confusing but ultimately rewarding life lived between two conflicting ethnic identities. When Mel Leventhal married Alice Walker during the civil rights movement in the late 1960s, his mother declared him dead and did not reconcile until after the birth of her first grandchild.
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Black, White, Just Right!
Marguerite W. Davol
A girl explains how her parents differ in color, tastes in art and food, and pet preferences, and how she herself is different too but just right.
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Blended
Sharon M. Draper
Piano-prodigy Isabella, eleven, whose black father and white mother struggle to share custody, never feels whole, especially as racial tensions affect her school, her parents both become engaged, and she and her stepbrother are stopped by police.
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Bo at Ballard Creek
Kirkpatrick Hill
It's the 1920s, and Bo was headed for an Alaska orphanage when she won the hearts of two tough gold miners who set out to raise her, enthusiastically helped by all the kind people of the nearby Eskimo village.
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Bobby the Brave (Sometimes)
Lisa Yee
Fourth-grader Bobby is hurt when he hears his father, a former professional football player, say that the two of them are nothing alike, but finally summons the courage to talk about it after he suffers a public asthma attack.