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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Digging Up Trouble (Amy Hodgepodge, #6)
Kim Wayans and Kevin Knotts
When Amy's fourth-grade class must come up with a "green" project, they learn about community activism and fund-raising from Amy's visiting Grandmother Hodges as they raise money to help revitalize a community garden.
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Do I Have a Daddy?: A Story About a Single-Parent Child with a Special Section for Single Mothers and Fathers
Jeanne Warren Lindsay
A single mother explains to her son that his daddy left soon after he was born. Includes a section with suggestions for answering the question, "Do I have a daddy?"
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Do-Over
Rachel Vail
Thirteen-year-old Whitman has to deal with the anger he feels towards his father when his parents separate, his own interest in several girls, and the heady feeling of acting in his first play.
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Double Cross (Noughts & Crosses, #4)
Malorie Blackman
Tobey wants a better life - for him and his girlfriend Callie Rose. He wants nothing to do with the gangs that rule the world he lives in. But when he's offered the chance to earn some money just for making a few 'deliveries,' just this once, would it hurt to say 'yes'? One small decision can change everything.
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Double Trouble for Anna Hibiscus
Atinuke .
From the stellar team of Atinuke and Lauren Tobia comes the third Anna Hibiscus picture book title brimming with all the best-loved Hibiscus family members - and Anna's two brand new baby brothers! Everything is changing for Anna Hibiscus, she's a sister! But - oh dear - everyone is now so busy! Uncle Bizi-Sunday is shopping for the babies, Aunty Joli and Aunty Grace are rocking the babies and Mama and Grandma are fast asleep...but just who has time for Anna Hibiscus? I hate Double Trouble! shouts Anna. But Anna Hibiscus is amazing so it won't be long before everyone finds time for her again! A story which perfectly captures the anxiety and thrill of having a new sibling, this is a great title for any family with a new baby, or a baby on the way!
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Dozens of Cousins
Shutta Crum
At a family reunion, dozens of 'beastie' cousins spend the day running wild, playing in the creek, filling up on food, and making mischief.
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Dragon's Extraordinary Egg
Debi Gliori
A dragon finds an abandoned egg and lovingly raises the hatchling as her own, although Little One is very different from the baby dragons, and when disaster strikes it is the small, feathered hatchling that saves the day.
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Drawn Together
Minh Lê
A boy and his grandfather cross a language and cultural barrier using their shared love of art, storytelling, and fantasy.
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Dread Nation
Justina Ireland
When families go missing in Baltimore County, Jane McKeene, who is studying to become an Attendant, finds herself in the middle of a conspiracy that has her fighting for her life against powerful enemies.
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Dreamers
Yuyi Morales
An illustrated picture book autobiography in which award-winning author Yuyi Morales tells her own immigration story.
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Dreamland Burning
Jennifer Latham
When Rowan finds a skeleton on her family's property, investigating the brutal, century-old murder leads to painful discoveries about the past. Alternating chapters tell the story of William, another teen grappling with the racial firestorm leading up to the 1921 Tulsa race riot, providing some clues to the mystery.
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Dream On, Amber
Emma Shevah
As a half-Japanese, half-Italian girl with a ridiculous name, Amber's not feeling molto bene (very good) about making friends at her new school. But the hardest thing about being Amber is that a part of her is missing. Her dad. He left when she was little and he isn't coming back...not for her first day of middle school and not for her little sister's birthday. So Amber will have to dream up a way for the Miyamoto sisters to make it on their own.
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Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Barack Obama
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father, a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey, first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother's family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father's life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.
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Drita, My Homegirl
Jenny Lombard Lombard
When ten-year-old Drita and her family, refugees from Kosovo, move to New York, Drita is teased about not speaking English well, but after a popular student named Maxine is forced to learn about Kosovo as a punishment for teasing Drita, the two girls soon bond.
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Drum Dream Girl: How One Girl's Courage Changed Music
Margarita Engle
Girls cannot be drummers. Long ago on an island filled with music, no one questioned that rule-until the drum dream girl. In her city of drumbeats, she dreamed of pounding tall congas and tapping small bongs̤. She had to keep quiet. She had to practice in secret. But when at last her dream-bright music was heard, everyone sang and danced and decided that both girls and boys should be free to drum and dream. Inspired by the childhood of Millo Castro Zaldarriaga, a Chinese-African-Cuban girl who broke Cuba's traditional taboo against female drummers, Drum Dream Girl tells an inspiring true story for dreamers everywhere.
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Dumpling Soup
Jama Kim Rattigan
A young Asian American girl living in Hawaii tries to make dumplings for her family's New Year's celebration.
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Dust Girl
Sarah Zettel
On the day in 1935 when her mother vanishes during the worst dust storm ever recorded in Kansas, Callie learns that she is not actually a human being.
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Echo After Echo
Amy Rose Capetta
Zara Evans has come to the Aurelia Theater, home to director Leopold Henneman, to play a dream role in Echo and Ariston, the Greek tragedy that taught her everything she knows about love. When the director asks Zara to promise that she will have no outside commitments, no distractions, it's easy to say yes. But are the deaths at the theater accidents, or murder, or a curse that always comes in threes? When assistant lighting director Eli Vasquez, a girl made of tattoos and abrupt laughs and every form of light, looks at Zara it's hard not to fall in love.
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Edgar Allan
John Neufeld
When the Fickett family decides to adopt a little black boy, they are faced with threats, angry phone calls, a burning cross on the lawn, and an ultimatum from their oldest daughter.
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Either the Beginning or the End of the World
Terry Farish
For sixteen years, it's been just Sofie and her father, living on the New Hampshire coast. Her Cambodian immigrant mother has floated in and out of her life, leaving Sofie with a fierce bitterness toward her-and a longing she wishes she could outgrow. "To me she is as unreliable as the wind." Then she meets Luke, an army medic back from Afghanistan, and the pull between them is as strong as the current of the rushing Piscataqua River. But Luke is still plagued by the trauma of war, as if he's lost with the ghosts in his past. Sofie's dad orders her to stay away; it may be the first time she has ever disobeyed him. "A ghost can't love you." When Sofie is forced to stay with her mother and grandmother while her dad's away, she is confronted with their memories of the ruthless Khmer Rouge, a war-torn countryside, and deeds of heartbreaking human devotion. "I don't want you for ancestors. I don't want that story." As Sofie and Luke navigate a forbidden landscape, they discover they both have their secrets, their scars, their wars. Together, they are dangerous. Together, they'll discover what extraordinary acts love can demand.
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Eleanor & Park
Rainbown Rowell
Two misfits. One extraordinary love. Eleanor -- Red hair, wrong clothes. Standing behind him until he turns his head. Lying beside him until he wakes up. Making everyone else seem drabber and flatter and never good enough -- Eleanor. Park -- He knows she'll love a song before he plays it for her. He laughs at her jokes before she ever gets to the punch line. There's a place on his chest, just below his throat, that makes her want to keep promises -- Park. Set over the course of one school year, this is the story of two star-crossed sixteen-year-olds -- smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try.
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Ellabug
Gregory Turner-Rahman
Ellabug is a simple story about non-traditional families that follows Ella, a small but strong-willed ladybug, as she begins to question her identity.
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Emily Goldberg Learns to Salsa
Micol Ostow
Forced to stay with her mother in Puerto Rico for weeks after her grandmother's funeral, half-Jewish Emily, who has just graduated from a Westchester, New York, high school, does not find it easy to connect with her Puerto Rican heritage and relatives she had never met.
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Emma's Story
Deborah Hodge
When Emma sets out to make a cookie family with Grandma and Sam, the happy afternoon suddenly turns sad. The cookies are meant to look like her family, but Emma's is the only one with dark hair and eyes. She doesn't look like the others; does that mean she doesn't belong? In this tender story, Emma learns that there are many ways to come together and form a family.
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Epossumondas Plays Possum
Coleen Salley
Forgetting his mother's warnings, Epossumondas goes into the swamp alone then must pretend to be dead time and again as he hears frightening sounds and fears they are being made by the dreaded loup garou.