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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Escape from Saigon: How a Vietnam War Orphan Became an American Boy
Andrea Warren
Chronicles the experiences of an orphaned Amerasian boy from his birth and early childhood in Saigon through his departure from Vietnam in the 1975 Operation Babylift and his subsequent life as the adopted son of an American family in Ohio.
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Escaping Perfect (Escaping Perfect, #1)
Emma Harrison
To escape her extremely sheltered life, eighteen-year-old Cecilia grabs a chance to strike out on her own in Sweetbriar, Tennessee, where she is transformed by her first job, apartment, and love but always waits for her mother, a U.S. Senator, to find her.
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Escaping Tornado Season: A Story in Poems
Julie Williams
Poems describe how thirteen-year-old Allie, living with her grandparents in a small Minnesota town in the 1960s, struggles to cope with her father's recent death, being abandoned by her mother, and trying to fit in at school.
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Everything, Everything
Nicola Yoon
The story of a teenage girl who's literally allergic to the outside world. When a new family moves in next door, she begins a complicated romance that challenges everything she's ever known. The narrative unfolds via vignettes, diary entries, texts, charts, lists, illustrations, and more.
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Everything You Need to Know about Being a Biracial / Biethnic Teen
Renea D. Nash
This book for children and teenagers discusses what it means to be biracial or biethnic and what it means to find one's own identity.
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Every Year on Your Birthday
Rose A. Lewis
Each year on the birthday of her adopted Chinese daughter, a mother recalls the moments they have shared, from the first toy to the friends left behind in China.
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Exclusively Chloe
J. A. Yang
In the public eye since she was adopted as a baby from China by her Hollywood celebrity parents, sixteen-year-old Chloe-Grace, longing for a "normal" life," undergoes a transformation with the help of her mother's stylist and finds not only the life she wanted but an important key to her past.
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Extra Innings
Robert Newton Peck
After a tragic airplane crash that claims the lives of most of his family, sixteen-year-old Tate goes to live with his wealthy great-grandfather and his adopted black great-aunt Vidalia and he finds unexpected solace in the stories of her childhood spent travelling with a Depression-era Negro baseball team.
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Families
Susan Kuklin
In frank interviews, children from fifteen different types of families talk about the ups and downs of their home lives and offer a look at diversity in American society
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Families
Ann Morris
A simple explanation of families, how they function, how they are different, and how they are alike.
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Families
Shelley Rotner and Sheila M. Kelly
Big or small, similar or different-looking, there are all kinds of families. Some have one parent, some have two, and many include extended family. This inclusive look at many varieties of families will help young readers see beyond their own immediate experiences.
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Families: A Celebration of Diversity, Commitment, and Love
Aylette Jenness
Photographs and text depict the lives of seventeen families from around the country, some with step relationships, divorce, gay parents, foster siblings, and other diverse components. The material was originally a traveling exhibition, begun at the Children's Museum in Boston.
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Families are Different
Nina Pellegrini
An adopted Korean girl discovers that her classmates have different types of families
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Families are Forever
Craig Shemin
Rain meets Bo and her new "forever" Mom and they become a brand new family. Families are Forever is a heartwarming tale about family love and beginnings. The story introduces Rain, a nearly six year old Chinese-American adopted girl, and tells how she found her 'forever family,' a single mother in America.
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Families, Families, Families!
Suzanne Lang
A host of animals portrays all kinds of non-traditional families.
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Family
Isabell Monk
Hope's new and unusual dessert blends well with the traditional dishes prepared by her cousins and Aunt Poogee at their annual summer get-together.
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Fans of the Impossible Life
Kate Kate Scelsa
At Saint Francis Prep school in Mountain View, New Jersey, Mira, Jeremy, and Sebby come together as they struggle with romance, bullying, foster home and family problems, and mental health issues.
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Far from the Tree
Robin Benway
Grace, adopted at birth, is raised as an only child. At sixteen she's just put her own baby up for adoption, and now is looking for her biological family. She discovers Maya, her loudmouthed younger bio sister who was also adopted; and Joaquin, their stoic older bio brother, who has no interest in bonding over their shared biological mother after seventeen years in the foster care system. Grace struggles between cautious joy at having found them, and the true meaning of family in all its forms.
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Finding Joy
Marion Coste
Shu-li, an infant girl who had to be sent away by her family in China, is adopted by an American family and renamed Joy.
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Finding Langston
Lesa Cline-Ransome
Discovering a book of Langston Hughes' poetry in the library helps Langston cope with the loss of his mother, relocating from Alabama to Chicago as part of the Great Migration, and being bullied.
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Finlater
Shawn Stewart Ruff
In this Lambda Literary Award-winning debut, the course of growing up in just-this-side-of-segregation 1970s Cincinnati, Ohio, seems predictable if uninspiring for Cliffy Douglas. That is, until the deadbeat father of this gifted 13-year-old black kid from the Finlater Gardens Projects appears out of nowhere. The real fun and trouble begin when Noah, a Jewish boy he meets in junior high school, takes him on a joyride to first lust and love.
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First Daughter: Extreme American Makeover
Mitali Perkins
During her father's presidential campaign, sixteen-year-old Sameera Righton, who was adopted from Pakistan at the age of three, struggles with campaign staffers who want to give her a more "all-American" image and create a fake weblog in her name.
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Flygirl
Sherri L. Smith
During World War II, a light-skinned African American girl "passes" for white in order to join the Women Airforce Service Pilots.
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For a Muse of Fire
Heidi Heilig
Jetta, a teen who possesses secret, forbidden powers, must gain access to a hidden spring and negotiate a world roiling with intrigue and the beginnings of war.
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Forbidden Love
Gary B. Nash
Presents accounts of how mainly anonymous Americans have defied the official racial ideology and points out how guardians of the past have written that side of our history out of the record.