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.
Browse by Diversity Impact:
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The Hunting Accident: A True Story of Crime and Poetry
David L. Carlson
It was a hunting accident; that much Charlie is sure of. That's how his father, Matt Rizzo--a gentle intellectual who writes epic poems in Braille--had lost his vision. It's not until Charlie's troubled teenage years, when he's facing time for his petty crimes, that he learns the truth. Matt Rizzo was blinded by a shotgun blast to the face, but it was while participating in an armed robbery. Newly blind and without hope, Matt began his bleak new life at Stateville Prison. In this unlikely place, Matt's life and very soul were saved by one of America's most notorious killers, Nathan Leopold Jr., of the infamous Leopold and Loeb.
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The Impossible Patriotism Project
Linda Skeers
Caleb has a hard time coming up with a way to symbolize patriotism for Presidents' Day until he realizes that his dad, who is away from home in the military, is what patriotism is all about.
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The Inexplicable Logic of My Life
Benjamin Alire Saenz
A story set on the American border with Mexico, about family and friendship, life and death, and one teen struggling to understand what his adoption does and doesn't mean about who he is.
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The Journey
Francesca Sanna
With haunting echoes of the current refugee crisis, this beautifully illustrated book explores the unimaginable decisions made as a family leave their home and everything they know to escape the turmoil and tragedy brought by war. This book will stay with you long after the last page is turned.
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The Junkyard Wonders
Patricia Polacco
Inspired by a teacher who believes each of them is a genius, a class of special-needs students invents something that could convince the whole school they are justifiably proud to be "Junkyard Wonders."
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The Key to Every Thing
Pat Schmatz
For eleven-year-old Tash, Cap’n Jackie isn’t just the elderly next-door neighbor — she’s family. When she disappears, only Tash holds the key that might bring her back.Tash didn’t want to go to camp, didn’t want to spend the summer with a bunch of strangers, didn’t want to be separated from the only two people she has ever been able to count on: her uncle Kevin, who saved her from foster care, and Cap’n Jackie, who lives next door. Camp turns out to be pretty fun, actually, but when Tash returns home, Cap’n Jackie is gone. And Tash needs her — the made-up stories of dolphin-dragons, the warm cookies that made everything all right after a fight, the key Cap’n Jackie always insisted had magic in it. The Captain always said all Tash had to do was hold it tight and the magic would come. Was it true? Could the key bring Cap’n Jackie back?
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The Lady in the Box
Ann McGovern
It is wintertime in the city and freezing cold, but not everyone is inside and warm. Ben and his sister Lizzie know that there is a lady who lives outside in a box over a warm air vent. Gently told and powerfully illustrated in rich hues, The Lady in the Box deals candidly with the issue of homelessness.
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The Land
Mildred D. Taylor
After the Civil War, Paul, the son of a white father and a black mother, finds himself caught between the two worlds of colored folks and white folks as he pursues his dream of owning land of his own.
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The Last Exit to Normal
Michael B. Harmon
After moving from Spokane, Washington, to a small Montana town with his father and his father's boyfriend, Ben notices that something is not quite right with the little boy next door and determines to do something about it.
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The Last Summer of the Garrett Girls
Jessica Spotswood
Told through four viewpoints, sisters Des, Bea, Kat, and Vi, aged nineteen to fifteen, are each transformed, especially in how they see one another, in the last summer before Bea leaves for college.
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The Last to Let Go
Amber Smith
When her mother is arrested for killing Brooke's abusive father, Brooke must confront the shadow of her family's violence and dysfunction.
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The Last True Love Story
Brendan Kiely
Hendrix and Corrina bust Hendrix's grandfather out of assisted living, and leave LA for New York in pursuit of freedom, truth, and love.
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The Latte Rebellion
Sarah Jamila Stevenson
When high school senior Asha Jamison is called a "towel head" at a pool party, she and her best friend Carey start a club to raise awareness of mixed-race students that soon sweeps the country, but the hubbub puts her Ivy League dreams, friendship, and beliefs to the test.
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The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin
A lone human ambassador is sent to the icebound planet of Winter, a world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitants’ gender is fluid. His goal is to facilitate Winter’s inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the strange, intriguing culture he encounters.
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The Length of a String
Elissa Brent Weissman
Imani knows exactly what she wants as her big bat mitzvah gift: to find her birth parents. She loves her family and her Jewish community in Baltimore, but she has always wondered where she came from, especially since she's black and almost everyone she knows is white. Then her mom's grandmother--Imani's great-grandma Anna--passes away, and Imani discovers an old journal among her books. It's Anna's diary from 1941, the year she was twelve and fled Nazi-occupied Luxembourg alone, sent by her parents to seek refuge in Brooklyn, New York. Anna's diary records her journey to America and her new life with an adoptive family of her own. And as Imani reads the diary, she begins to see her family, and her place in it, in a whole new way.
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The Less-Dead
April Lurie
Sixteen-year-old Noah Nordstrom, whose father is the host of a popular evangelical Christian radio program, believes that the person who has been killing gay teenagers in the Austin, Texas, foster care system, is a regular caller on his dad's show.
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The Letter Q: A Queer Writers' Notes to Their Younger Selves
Sarah Moon
If you received a letter from your older self, what do you think it would say? What do you wish it would say? That the boy you were crushing on in History turns out to be gay too, and that you become boyfriends in college? That the bully who is making your life miserable will one day become so insignificant that you won't remember his name until he shows up at your book signing? In this anthology, sixty-three award-winning authors such as Michael Cunningham, Amy Bloom, Jacqueline Woodson, Gregory Maguire, David Levithan, and Armistead Maupin make imaginative journeys into their pasts, telling their younger selves what they would have liked to know then about their lives as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender people. Through stories, in pictures, with bracing honesty, these are words of love and understanding, reasons to hold on for the better future ahead. They will tell you things about your favorite authors that you never knew before. And they will tell you about yourself.
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The Liberation of Gabriel King
K. L. Going
In Georgia during the summer of 1976, Gabriel, a white boy who is being bullied, and Frita, an African American girl who is facing prejudice, decide to overcome their many fears together as they enter fifth grade.
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The Lines We Cross
Randa Abdel-Fattah
Michael's parents are leaders of a new anti-immigrant political party called Aussie Values which is trying to halt the flood of refugees from the Middle East; Mina fled Afghanistan with her family ten years ago, and just wants to concentrate on fitting in and getting into college--but the mutual attraction they feel demands that they come to terms with their family's concerns and decide where they stand in the ugly anti-Muslim politics of the time.
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The Line Tender
Kate Allen
Wherever the sharks led, Lucy Everhart's marine-biologist mother was sure to follow. In fact, she was on a boat far off the coast of Massachusetts, collecting shark data when she died suddenly. Lucy was seven. Since then Lucy and her father have kept their heads above water—thanks in large part to a few close friends and neighbors. But June of her twelfth summer brings more than the end of school and a heat wave to sleepy Rockport. On one steamy day, the tide brings a great white—and then another tragedy, cutting short a friendship everyone insists was "meaningful" but no one can tell Lucy what it all meant. To survive the fresh wave of grief, Lucy must grab the line that connects her depressed father, a stubborn fisherman, and a curious old widower to her mother's unfinished research on the Great White's return to Cape Cod. If Lucy can find a way to help this unlikely quartet follow the sharks her mother loved, she'll finally be able to look beyond what she's lost and toward what's left to be discovered.
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The Lions of Little Rock
Kristin Levine
In 1958 Little Rock, Arkansas, painfully shy twelve-year-old Marlee sees her city and family divided over school integration, but her friendship with Liz, a new student, helps her find her voice and fight against racism.
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The Little Green Goose
Adele Sansone and J. Alison James
Mr. Goose finds an abandoned egg, hatches it, and raises a peculiar green-skinned long-tailed chick, who worries about his identity but comes to recognize that he has a loving parent.
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The Little Lame Prince
Rosemary Wells
Cruel Osvaldo rules El Cordoba - keeping the people poor and unhappy. The true heir to the throne, Francisco, has been banished to a tower. Orphaned and crippled when he was very young, Francisco grows up unaware that he should be king. But one day he discovers his true idenity.
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The Lost Marble Notebook of Forgotten Girl and Random Boy
Maria Jaskulka
Forgotten Girl is going through the most difficult time of her life-- the breakup of her parents, and her mom's resulting depression. She meets Random Boy, a hot guy who, like her, feels like an outcast and secretly writes poetry to deal with everything going on in his life. They come from opposite sides of the tracks, yet they find understanding in each other when they lay bare their life stories through the poetry they write and share with each other.
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The Lottery Plus One
Emma Donoghue
Once upon a time, two couples with Jamaican, Mohawk, Indian, and Scottish ethnic roots won the lottery and bought a big house where all of them, four adults and seven adopted and biological children, could live together in harmony--but change is inevitable, especially when a disagreeable grandfather comes to stay.