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 Health & Disability:
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Keeping Up with Roo
Sharlee Mullins Glenn
Gracie has always had a special bond with her Aunt Roo, who is mentally disabled, but that relationship starts to change when Gracie begins school.
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Keurium
Jessica Sun Lee
Shay Stone lies in a hospital bed, catatonic -- dead to the world. Her family thinks it's a ploy for attention. Doctors believe it's the result of an undisclosed trauma. At the mercy of memories and visitations, Shay unearths secrets that may have led to her collapse. Will she remain paralyzed in denial? Or can she accept the unfathomable and break free?
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Kids of Appetite
David Arnold
Teens Victor Benucci and Madeline Falco sit in separate police interrogation rooms telling about the misfits who brought them together and their journey sparked by a message in an urn.
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King for a Day
Rukhsana Khan
Even though he is confined to a wheelchair, a Pakistani boy tries to capture the most kites during Basant, the annual spring kite festival, and become "king" for the day. Includes an afterword about the Basant festival.
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Laurie
Elfi Nijssen
Laurie is a little girl who would love to be like other children, but her hearing problems can make that difficult, until she goes to the ear doctor and gets new hearing aids that allow her to hear things around her clearly.
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Leading Ladies
Marlee Matlin and Doug Cooney
A deaf fourth-grader finds her true calling when she is cast as Dorothy in a school production of "The Wizard of Oz."
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Leonardo's Hand
Warwick Downing
Finally in a foster home with a caring family, Nard, a thirteen-year-old orphan with only one hand, invents a human-powered flying machine with the assistance of the 500-year-old hand of Leonardo da Vinci.
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Liberty
Kirby Larson
In 1940s New Orleans, Fish Elliot is a polio-survivor with a knack for inventing and building things, and his African American neighbor Olympia is a girl with a talent for messing things up, but they are united in an effort to save a starving stray dog they call Liberty--and when Liberty is caged by a nasty farmer, they find an unlikely ally in a German prisoner of war, Erich, who is not much older than the two children.
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Life Happens Next
Terry Trueman
Shawn's got a new perspective on life. But no one has a clue. That's because they can see only his wheelchair, his limp body, his drool. What they don't see? His brain, with perfect auditory memory. And his heart, which is in love with a girl. And his fierce belief that someday someone will realize there's way more to him than his appearance.
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Lighter Than My Shadow
Katie Green
A graphic memoir of eating disorders, abuse, and recovery. Lighter Than My Shadow is a hand-drawn story of struggle and recovery, a trip into the black heart of a taboo illness; an exposure of those who are so weak as to prey on the weak, and an inspiration to anybody who believes in the human power toendure towards happiness.
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Like Water
Rebecca Podos
When her father is diagnosed with Hungtington's disease, eighteen-year-old Vanni abandons her plan to flee her small New Mexico hometown after high school graduation and instead spends the summer keeping herself busy with part-time jobs and boys, but that changes after she meets Leigh, whose friendship dares Vanni to ask herself big questions and make new plans.
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Lily and Dunkin
Donna Gephart
Lily Jo McGrother, born Timothy McGrother, is a girl. But being a girl is not so easy when you look like a boy. Especially when you’re in the eighth grade. Dunkin Dorfman, birth name Norbert Dorfman, is dealing with bipolar disorder and has just moved from the New Jersey town he’s called home for the past thirteen years. This would be hard enough, but the fact that he is also hiding from a painful secret makes it even worse. One summer morning, Lily Jo McGrother meets Dunkin Dorfman, and their lives forever change.
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Little & Lion
Brandy Colbert
Suzette returns home to Los Angeles from boarding school and grapples with her bisexual identity when she and her [stepbrother] Lionel fall in love with the same girl, pushing Lionel's bipolar disorder to spin out of control and forcing Suzette to confront her own demons.
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Locomotion
Jacqueline Woodson
In a series of poems, eleven-year-old Lonnie writes about his life, after the death of his parents, separated from his younger sister, living in a foster home, and finding his poetic voice at school.
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Looking Out for Sarah
Glenna Lang
Describes a day in the life of a seeing eye dog, from going with his owner to the grocery store and post office, to visiting a class of school children, and playing ball, and also describes their three-hundred mile walk from Boston to New York.
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Look Up!
Jin-Ho Jung and Mi Hyun Kim
When a girl in a wheelchair calls to people far below to look up and see her, one finds a way to brighten her day.
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Losers Bracket
Chris Crutcher
When it comes to family, Annie is in the losers bracket. While her foster parents are great (mostly), her birth family would not have been her first pick. And no matter how many times Annie tries to write them out of her life, she always gets sucked back into their drama. Love is like that. But when a family argument breaks out at Annie's swim meet and her nephew goes missing, Annie might be the only one who can get him back. With help from her friends, her foster brother, and her social service worker, Annie puts the pieces of the puzzle together, determined to find her nephew and finally get him into a safe home.
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Lots of Grandparents
Shelly Rotner and Sheila M. Kelly
Color photographs show grandparents of different ages, ethnic groups, shapes, and sizes sharing happy times with grandchildren.
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Louisiana's Song
Kerry Madden
Set in the Appalachia in 1963, Livy Two has come to terms with the fact that her father is a changed man after being in a coma and so now, along with her eleven-year-old sister, Louisiana, she must find a way to take care of their father and their large mountain family.
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Love
Stacy McAnulty
A sweet and simple story about what love is really all about invites children to find love in everyday moments, from baking cookies with a grandparent to receiving notes in a lunchbox.
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Love and Other Carnivorous Plants
Florence Gonsalves
Freshman year at Harvard was the most anticlimactic year of Danny's life. She's failing pre-med and drifting apart from her best friend. One by one, Danny is losing all the underpinnings of her identity. When she finds herself attracted to an older, edgy girl who she met in rehab for an eating disorder, she finally feels like she might be finding a new sense of self. But when tragedy strikes, her self-destructive tendencies come back to haunt her as she struggles to discover who that self really is.
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Love Drugged
James Klise
Fifteen-year-old Jamie is dismayed by his attraction to boys, and when a beautiful girl shows an interest in him, he is all the more intrigued by her father's work developing a drug called Rehomoline.
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Lovely
Jess Hong
Big, small, curly, straight, loud, quiet, smooth, wrinkly. Lovely explores a world of differences that all add up to the same thing: we are all lovely!
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Mama Zooms
Jane Cown-Fletcher
A boy's wonderful mama takes him zooming everywhere with her, because her wheelchair is a zooming machine.
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Mary Ingalls on Her Own
Elizabeth Cody Kimmel
When she was just fourteen-years-old Mary Ingalls fell ill with scarlet fever and lost her sight. Now two years later Mary is getting the chance to continue her education at the Iowa College for the Blind. Going back to school is a dream come true for Mary, and at the Iowa College she will not only take academic classes, but will also learn Braille and other skills that will make her independent once again. But with this new opportunity comes new challenges, and as Mary struggles to adjust to life without her family, she is also forced to take a hard look at her future, and confront her true feelings about being blind.