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 Family Relationship:
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Red Thread Sisters
Caro Antoinette Peacock
This novel, by Carol Antoinette Peacock, offers a "story of friendship, family, and love. Wen has spent the first eleven years of her life at an orphanage in rural China . . . [with] her best friend, Shu Ling. When Wen is adopted by an American couple, she struggles . . . knowing that Shu Ling remains back at the orphanage, alone. Wen knows that her best friend deserves a family and a future, too. But finding a home for Shu Ling isn't easy, and time is running out."
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Reign of the Fallen
Sarah Glenn Marsh
Odessa, a master necromancer in Karthia, where nothing has changed in 200 years, uncovers a disturbing conspiracy and must fight alongside her fellow mages against terrifying, bloodthirsty Shades and their creator.
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Revenge and the Wild
Michelle Modesto
The two-bit town of Rogue City is a lawless place, full of dark magic and saloon brawls, monsters and six-shooters. But it’s just perfect for seventeen-year-old Westie, the notorious adopted daughter of local inventor Nigel Butler.
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Revolution
Jennifer Donnelly
An angry, grieving seventeen-year-old musician facing expulsion from her prestigious Brooklyn private school travels to Paris to complete a school assignment and uncovers a diary written during the French revolution by a young actress attempting to help a tortured, imprisoned little boy--Louis Charles, the lost king of France.
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Revolutions of the Heart
Marsha Qualey
Cory's seventeenth year is marked by her mother's sudden death, the return of her hotheaded older brother, her romance with a Native American boy, and the eruption of bigotry in her small Wisconsin town.
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Rice and Beans
Wiley Blevins
A young girl adopted from China sees that her hair and skin color are different from that of her parents. She finds, however, that there's much more to making a family than sharing red hair and freckles.
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Riding Chance
Christine Kendall
Since his mother died thirteen-year-old Troy has been skipping school and hanging out with the wrong crowd, and now he and his friend Foster have been sentenced to work in the local Philadelphia stables; at first he is apprehensive around the horses, but soon he bonds with a mare named Chance, and discovers the sport of polo--but also makes some new enemies.
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Riding Freedom
Pam Muñoz Ryan
A fictionalized account of Charley (Charlotte) Parkhurst who ran away from an orphanage, posed as a boy, moved to California, and fooled everyone by her appearance.
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Rits
Mariken Jongman and Wanda Boeke
When his father runs off with his girlfriend and his distraught mother is admitted to an institution, thirteen-year-old Rits goes to live with his uncle and tries to make the best of his unusual circumstances.
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Robert Lives with His Grandparents
Martha Hickman Whitmore
Robert is embarrassed to admit to his classmates that he has lived with his grandparents ever since his parents' divorce.
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Rosa Parks: Civil Rights Activist
Chuck Bednar
Profiles the life and career of the civil rights activist Rosa Parks.
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Rose Under Fire
Elizabeth Wein
Rose Justice is a young pilot with the Air Transport Auxiliary during the Second World War. On her way back from a semi-secret flight in the waning days of the war, Rose is captured by the Germans and ends up in Ravensbrück, the notorious Nazi women's concentration camp. There, she meets an unforgettable group of women, including a once glamorous and celebrated French detective novelist whose Jewish husband and three young sons have been killed; a resilient young girl who was a human guinea pig for Nazi doctors trying to learn how to treat German war wounds; and a Nachthexen, or Night Witch, a female fighter pilot and military ace for the Soviet air force. These damaged women must bond together to help each other survive. In this companion volume to the critically acclaimed novel Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein continues to explore themes of friendship and loyalty, right and wrong, and unwavering bravery in the face of indescribable evil.
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Rosie and Skate
Beth Ann Bauman
New Jersey sisters Rosie, aged fifteen, and Skate, aged sixteen, cope differently with their father's alcoholism and incarceration, but manage to stay close to one another as they strive to lead normal lives and find hope for the future.
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Rosie's Family: An Adoption Story
Lori Rosove
Rosie's family is a story about belonging in a family regardless of differences. Rosie is a beagle who was adopted by schnauzers. She feels different from the rest of the family and sets forth many questions that children who were adopted may have.
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Rough, Tough Charley
Verla Kay
A brief illustrated biography of Charley Parkhurst, a stagecoach driver and pioneer of California who posed for most of her life as a man.
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Roving Pack
Sassafras Lowrey
Click, a straight-edge transgender kid, is searching for hir place within a pack of newly sober gender rebels in the dilapidated punk houses of Portland, Oregon circa 2002. Ze embarks on a dizzying whirlwind of leather, sex, hormones, house parties, and protests until hir gender fluidity takes an unexpected turn and the pack is sent reeling.
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Rubyfruit Jungle
Rita Mae Brown
A landmark coming-of-age novel that launched the career of one of this country’s most distinctive voices, Rubyfruit Jungle remains a transformative work more than forty years after its original publication. In bawdy, moving prose, Rita Mae Brown tells the story of Molly Bolt, the adoptive daughter of a dirt-poor Southern couple who boldly forges her own path in America. With her startling beauty and crackling wit, Molly finds that women are drawn to her wherever she goes—and she refuses to apologize for loving them back. This literary milestone continues to resonate with its message about being true to yourself and, against the odds, living happily ever after.
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Ruby Lu, Empress of Everything
Lenore Look
After Ruby Lu's deaf cousin, Flying Duck, and her parents come from China to live with her, Ruby finds life challenging as she adjusts to her new family, tries to mend her rocky relationship with her friend Emma, and faces various adventures in summer school.
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Ruby on the Outside
Nora Raleigh Baskin
Eleven-year-old Ruby Danes has a real best friend for the first time ever, but agonizes over whether or not to tell her a secret she has never shared with anyone--that her mother has been in prison since Ruby was five--and over whether to express her anger to her mother.
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Ruby, the Red-Hot Witch at Bloomingdale's
Marlene Fanta Shyer
When Ruby, the witch who works at Bloomingdale's, cures her younger brother's nervous hiccups, thirteen-year-old Petra wonders if Ruby's magic can get her separated parents back together.
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Runaway!
Janet Willig
After leaving home because her drunken father frequently beats her, fourteen-year-old Jodie tries out a couple of foster homes and eventually finds peace with a loving Christian family.
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Runaways, Vol. 1: Find Your Way Home
Rainbow Rowell
When the Runaways eliminate the Pride from Los Angeles, it leaves a vacuum of power in the city's underworld, and soon Nico, Karolina, Gert, Chase, and Molly are on the run again to uncover the truth behind their parents' past before it catches up to them.
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Runaways, Vol. 2: Best Friends Forever
Rainbow Rowell
The Runaways are a family again! But a family needs a guardian, and the only Runaway who's got her life together is in middle school. And, even for a kid like Molly who likes her classes, that can be fraught with peril. Meanwhile, there's a new arrival as the gang welcomes Karolina's girlfriend - Julie Power of Power Pack! Having an experienced adventurer around will be useful when one of the universe's most fearsome villains invades the hostel! But do some of the Runaways have mixed feelings about Julie's arrival? As Molly contemplates a supernatural deal that must have a monkey's paw-esque downside, one of the team suff ers a fate worse than death. Really! And will the Runaways' greatest foe be...well-meaning outsiders who want to help them?!
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Runaway Twin
Peg Kehret
Thirteen-year-old Sunny, accompanied by a stray dog, takes advantage of a windfall to travel from her Nebraska foster home to Enumclaw, Washington, to find the twin sister from whom she was separated at age three.
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Running on Empty
S. E. Durrant
After his grandfather dies, eleven-year-old JJ, a talented runner, assumes new responsibilities including taking care of his intellectually-challenged parents and figuring out how bills get paid.