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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The Goodbye Book
Todd Parr
Illustrations and brief text relate how a person might feel when they lose someone they love.
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The Good Dog and the Bad Cat
Todd Kessler
When a mysterious thief is hiding in the Lee household and store, little puppy Tako is assigned the task of uncovering the mystery.
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The Good Garden: How One Family Went from Hunger to Having Enough
Katie Smith Milway
Eleven-year-old María Luz and her family have a small farm in Honduras, but may not have enough food to sustain them for the year, so Maria's father must leave home to find work, leaving her in charge of the garden. Includes helpful tips and organizations that are set up to help aid in the global food crisis.
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The Grave
James Heneghan
Thirteen-year-old Tom, an unhappy foster child in Liverpool, falls into a massive open grave and is transported to Ireland in 1847, where he finds himself in the midst of the deadly potato famine.
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The Great American Whatever
Tim Federle
Teenaged Quinn, an aspiring screenwriter, copes with his sister's death while his best friend forces him back out into the world to face his reality.
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The Great Big Book of Families
Mary Hoffman
Features illustrations and descriptions of different types of families and how their lives are similar and different.
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The Great Gilly Hopkins
Katherine Paterson
Watch out world! The Great Gilly Hopkins is looking for a home. She's a foster kid who's been angry, lonely, and hurting for so long that's she's always ready for a fight. Be on the lookout for her best barracuda smile, the one she saves for well-meaning social workers. Watch out for her most fearful look, a cross between Dracula and Godzilla, used especially to scare shy foster brothers.
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The Great Shelby Holmes
Elizabeth Eulberg
Nine-year-old Shelby Holmes, the best detective in her Harlem neighborhood, and her new easy-going friend from downstairs, eleven-year-old John Watson, become partners in a dog-napping case.
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The Grooming of Alice
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
During the summer between eighth and ninth grades, Alice and her friends Pamela and Elizabeth decide to improve themselves through exercise.
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The Hate U Give
Angie Thomas
Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil's name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr. But what Starr does or does not say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life.
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The Hidden World of Changers #3 The Power Within
H.K. Varian
Darren, Fiona, Mack, and Gabriella are Changers, a magical line of shapeshifters that can transform into mythological creatures, from werewolves and selkies to lightning birds and spirit foxes. They still have a lot to learn when it comes to their powers, but the kids are finally showing some progress fighting as a team, and the First Four think they're ready for a new mission. Young Changers in the area have been mysteriously disappearing, and it's up to the kids to figure out who-or what's behind it. But ever since his parents announced their divorce, Darren has been having a rough time coping-and his lightning abilities are going haywire.
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The History of Us
Nyrae Dawn
Eighteen-year-old Bradley Collins came out a year ago and hasn't looked back since. Who cares if he doesn't know any other gay people? Bradley has friends and basketball -- that's all he needs. Even if that means always sitting on the sidelines when the guys go out looking for girls. When cute film-boy TJ tries to flirt with Bradley while his friends are doing their thing, he freaks. Yeah, he's gay, but he's never had the opportunity to go out with a boy before. He's never had to worry about how his friends will react to seeing him with a guy. Bradley accompanies TJ on a road trip to film TJ's senior project documentary. In each city they visit, they meet with people from different walks of life, and Bradley learns there's a whole lot more to being honest about himself than just coming out. He still has to figure out who he really is and learn to be okay with what he discovers.
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The Home for Unwanted Girls
Joanna Goodman
In 1950s Quebec, French and English tolerate each other with precarious civility--much like Maggie Hughes' parents. Maggie's English-speaking father has ambitions for his daughter that don't include marriage to the poor French boy the next farm over. But Maggie's heart is captured by Gabriel Phénix. When she becomes pregnant at fifteen, her parents send the baby Elodie to an orphanage where she receives horrible treatment. Seventeen years later, Maggie, married to a businessman eager to start a family, cannot forget the daughter she was forced to abandon, and a chance reconnection with Gabriel spurs a wrenching choice. As time passes, the stories of Maggie and Elodie intertwine but never touch, until Maggie realizes she must take what she wants from life and go in search of her long-lost daughter, finally reclaiming the truth that has been denied them both.
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The Homeless
Gail B. Stewart
Presents first-person accounts of individuals and families who are living as homeless persons in America's cities.
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The House on Mango Street
Sandra Cisneros
For Esperanza, a young girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, life is an endless landscape of concrete and run-down tenements, and she tries to rise above the hopelessness.
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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 Kat Sinclair Files #2 Graveyard Slot
Michelle Schusterman
Kat and her friends investigate ghosts in South America, and she finds herself involved in some mysteries that she might not want to unravel.
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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 Landry News
Andrew Clements
The bad news is that Cara Landry is the new kid at Denton Elementary School. The worse news is that her teacher, Mr. Larson, would rather read the paper and drink coffee than teach his students anything. So Cara decides to give Mr. Larson something else to read: her own newspaper, The Landry News. Before she knows it, the whole fifth-grade class is in on the project. But then the principal finds a copy of The Landry News, with unexpected results. Tomorrow's headline: Will Cara's newspaper cost Mr. Larson his job?
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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.