Direct Diversity | University of Central Florida

This collection contains materials filtered by Direct Diversity Impact from the DIVerse Families bibliography.

DIVerse Families is a comprehensive bibliography that demonstrates the growing diversity of families in the United States. This type of bibliography provides teachers, librarians, counselors, adoption agencies, children/young adults, and especially parents and grandparents needing to empower their children with materials that reflect their families.

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Far Apart, Close in Heart: Being a Family When a Loved One is Incarcerated

Becky Birtha

Children from all walks of life experience various emotions when their parent is in jail or prison, but they learn there are ways to communicate their feelings that will help improve their situation and remind them they are not alone.
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.
Far From the Tree

Virginia Deberry and Donna Grant

Two African-American sisters, Celeste, a doctor's wife trying to maintain a facade of normalcy, and Ronnie, a struggling actress, inherit a North Carolina house at the death of their father and face a painful encounter with long- suppressed family secrets.
Far from Xanadu

Julie Anne Peters

In this fresh, poignant novel Mike is struggling to come to terms with her father's suicide and her mother's detachment from her family. Mike (real name Mary Elizabeth) is gay and likes to pump iron, play softball and fix plumbing. When a glamorous new girl, Xanadu, arrives in Mike's small Kansas town, she falls in love at first sight. Xanadu is everything that Mike is not - cool, confident, feminine, sexy and - straight! No matter how close their growing friendship is, Mike is always going to be 'far from Xanadu'.
Fast Break

Mike Lupica

Since his mother's death, Jayson, twelve, has focused on basketball and surviving but he is found out and placed with an affluent foster family of a different race, and must learn to accept many changes, including facing his former teammates in a championship game.
Fat Angie

E.E. Charlton-Trujillo Charlton-Trujillo

Fat Angie's sister was captured in Iraq, she's the resident laughingstock at school, and her therapist tells her to count instead of eat. Can a daring new girl in her life really change anything?
Father's Day Blues

Irene Smalls-Hector

Cheryl Blues has to write an essay about Father's Day, but since she doesn't live with her father, she consults her grandmother, her aunt, and her mother about fathers.
Felicia's Favorite Story

Lesléa Newman

It's bedtime, but before Felicia goes to sleep she wants to hear her favorite story, the story of how she was adopted by Mama Nessa and Mama Linda.
Felix Ever After

Kacen Callender

Felix Love, a transgender seventeen-year-old, attempts to get revenge by catfishing his anonymous bully, but lands in a quasi-love triangle with his former enemy and his best friend.
Felix Yz

Lisa Bunker

Thirteen-year-old Felix Yz chronicles the final month before an experimental procedure meant to separate him from the fourth-dimensional creature, Zyx, with whom he was accidentally fused as a young child.
Fighting for Dontae

Mike Castan

When Mexican American seventh-grader Javier is assigned to work with a special education class and connects with Dontae, who has both physical and mental disabilities, his reputation among gang members and drug abusers no longer seems very important.
Finding Audrey

Sophie Kinsella

Meet Audrey: an ordinary teenage girl with not so ordinary problems. Aside from her completely crazy and chaotic family, she suffers from an anxiety disorder which makes talking to her brother's hot new best friend a bit of a challenge.
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.
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.
Finding the Right Spot: When Kids Can't Live with Their Parents

Janice Levy and Whitney Martin

A young girl living with her foster parent describes the emotional ups and downs of being separated from her mother and living in unfamiliar surroundings. Finding the Right Spot is a story for all kids who can't live with their parents, regardless of the circumstances. It's a story about resilience and loyalty, hope and disappointment, love, sadness, and anger, too.
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.
Fire Song

Adam Garnet Jones

How can Shane reconcile his feelings for David with his desire for a better life? Shane is still reeling from the suicide of his kid sister, Destiny. How could he have missed the fact that she was so sad? He tries to share his grief with his girlfriend, Tara, but she's too concerned with her own needs to offer him much comfort. What he really wants is to be able to turn to the one person on the rez whom he loves--his friend, David. Things go from bad to worse as Shane's dream of going to university is shattered and his grieving mother withdraws from the world. Worst of all, he and David have to hide their relationship from everyone. Shane feels that his only chance of a better life is moving to Toronto, but David refuses to join him. When yet another tragedy strikes, the two boys have to make difficult choices about their future together. With deep insight into the life of Indigenous people on the reserve, this book masterfully portrays how a community looks to the past for guidance and comfort while fearing a future of poverty and shame.
Fish in a Tree

Lynda Mullaly Hunt

Ally has been smart enough to fool a lot of smart people. Every time she lands in a new school, she is able to hide her inability to read by creating clever yet disruptive distractions. She is afraid to ask for help; after all, how can you cure dumb? However, her newest teacher Mr. Daniels sees the bright, creative kid underneath the trouble maker. With his help, Ally learns not to be so hard on herself and that dyslexia is nothing to be ashamed of. As her confidence grows, Ally feels free to be herself and the world starts opening up with possibilities. She discovers that there’s a lot more to her—and to everyone—than a label, and that great minds don’t always think alike.
Five-Finger Discount

Barthe DeClements

Ten-year-old Jerry's attempts to adjust to his new school and make new friends are complicated by his determination to keep secret the fact that his father is serving time in the local prison for being a thief.
Fly Away Home

Eve Bunting

A homeless boy who lives in an airport with his father, moving from terminal to terminal trying not to be noticed, is given hope when a trapped bird finally finds its freedom.
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.
Fly Little Bird, Fly!: The True Story of Oliver Nordmark & America's Orphan Trains

Donna Nordmark Aviles

Holding tight to one another, vowing never to be separated, Oliver and Edward board the Orphan Train headed west to find a new home.
Focused

Alyson Gerber

Twelve-year-old Clea wants to do her homework, follow instructions, pay attention in school, and play chess on the school team, but somehow she cannot focus on whatever is in front of her, and the other kids at school are starting to notice and make fun of her; when her worried parents take her to be tested she finds out that she has ADHD (only without the hyperactivity)--and with help from the psychiatrist who seems to really understand her she is determined to learn how to focus.
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.
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.