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 Year of the Fortune Cookie
Andrea Cheng
Eleven-year-old Anna takes a trip to China and learns more about herself and her Chinese heritage.
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The Year of the Perfect Christmas
Gloria Houston
Ruthie and her mother wonder how they will fulfill their obligation of getting the perfect Christmas tree to the town for the holiday celebration, since Papa has left the Appalachian area to go to war.
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The Year the Swallows Came Early
Kathryn Fitzmaurice
After her father is sent to jail, eleven-year-old Groovy Robinson must decide if she can forgive the failings of someone she loves.
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They Never Came Back
Caroline B. Cooney
When fifteen-year-old Cathy decides to carpool from Norwalk to tony Greenwich, Connecticut, to study Latin in summer school, she does not expect the shocking events that occured five years earlier to suddenly come flooding back into her relatively settled life.
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This is Kind of an Epic Love Story
Kheryn Callender
Budding screenwriter Nate, sixteen, finds his conviction that happy endings do not happen in real life sorely tested when his childhood best friend and crush, Oliver James Hernandez, moves back to town
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Those Shoes
Maribeth Boelts
Jeremy, who longs to have the black high tops that everyone at school seems to have but his grandmother cannot afford, is excited when he sees them for sale in a thrift shop and decides to buy them even though they're the wrong size.
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Three Little Words
Sarah N. Harvey
When Sid leaves his foster family on their remote island home in search of the mother he doesn't remember and a brother he's never met, he's ill-prepared for the surprises he finds.
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Three Little Words: A Memoir
Ashley Rhodes-Courter
"Sunshine, you're my baby and I'm your only mother. You must mind the one taking care of you, but she's not your mama." Ashley Rhodes-Courter spent nine years of her life in fourteen different foster homes, living by those words. As her mother spirals out of control, Ashley is left clinging to an unpredictable, dissolving relationship, all the while getting pulled deeper and deeper into the foster care system.
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Three Names of Me
Mary Cummings
A girl adopted from China explains that her three names--one her birth mother whispered in her ear, one the babysitters at her orphanage called her, and one her American parents gave her--are each an important part of who she is. Includes scrapbooking ideas for other girls adopted from China.
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Three Pennies
Melanie Crowder
In San Francisco, eleven-year-old Marin desperately searches for her birthmother knowing time is running out before she is adopted, and discovers for the first time in her life what it feels like to be truly wanted by someone.
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Through Moon and Stars and Night Skies
Ann Turner
A boy who came from far away to be adopted by a couple in this country remembers how unfamiliar and frightening some of the things were in his new home, before he accepted the love to be found there.
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Through the Eyes of a Child
Jimena Licitra
William was a happy little boy who lived with his parents in a green house with a lovely little garden, decorated with paper flowers. But one day everything changed. It was as if he'd been torn in two and turned into two different kids: one who went with his dad, and another who stayed with his mom. Through the Eyes of a Child reminds us of the importance of communicating, and that after a change in a family's structure, a child can feel “whole" again and grow up happily...even though his parents have separated.
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Tiger's Curse (The Tiger Saga, #1)
Collen Houck
Seventeen-year-old Oregon teenager Kelsey forms a bond with a circus tiger who is actually one of two brothers, Indian princes Ren and Kishan, who were cursed to live as tigers for eternity, and she travels with him to India where the tiger's curse may be broken once and for all.
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Tiger's Fall
Molly Bang
After eleven-year-old Lupe is partially paralyzed in an accident in her Mexican village, other handicapped people help her realize that her life can still have purpose.
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Tight Times
Barbara Shook Hazen
A small boy, not allowed to have a dog because times are tight, finds a starving kitten in a trash can on the same day his father loses his job.
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Tillmon County Fire
Pamela Ehrenberg
In tiny Tillmon County, where it seems like nothing ever happens, a mysterious fire rocks the lives of the teenagers who live there. Who set the fire that night, and more importantly, who owns the reasons behind it? As the story unfolds, the lines between truth and fiction, motive and happenstance, guilt and innocence blur. This novel-in-stories is told sequentially in the voices of its disparate cast of characters: a frustrated adoptee, a gay teenager, a big-city kid who is new in town and wishes he were back in Manhattan, a pregnant store clerk, and a boy with autism who is more at the center of events than he imagines.
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Tilt
Ellen Hopkins
Three teens, connected by their parents' bad choices, tell in their own voices of their lives and loves as Shane finds his first boyfriend, Mikayla discovers that love can be pushed too far, and Harley loses herself in her quest for new experiences.
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Timekeeper
Alexandra Monir
Bewildered by a new student at her Manhattan high school who does not know her but seems to be Philip Walker, her lost love from her time travels, and threatened by Rebecca, who has held a grudge against her family for 120 years, sixteen-year-old Michele Windsor seeks help in her father journals and The Handbook of The Time Society.
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Timeless
Alexandra Monir
Forced to live with her wealthy, estranged grandparents in New York City after her mother dies, sixteen-year-old Michele retreats to her room where she finds a diary that transports her back to 1910--with life-changing consequences.
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Toby's Doll's House
Ragnhild Scamell
Even though all Toby wants for his birthday is a dollhouse, his relatives give him a fort, and a farm, and a multi-level parking lot.
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Top Ten
Katie Cotugno
Ryan McCullough and Gabby Hart are the unlikeliest of best friends. Prickly, anxious Gabby would rather do literally anything than go to a party. Ultra-popular Ryan is a hockey star who can get any girl he wants and frequently does. But somehow their relationship just works; from dorky Monopoly nights to rowdy house parties to the top ten lists they make about everything under the sun. Now, on the night of high school graduation, everything is suddenly changing--in their lives, and in their relationship. As they try to figure out what they mean to each other and where to go from here, they make a final top ten list: this time, counting down the top ten moments of their friendship.
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Touch Blue
Cynthia Lord
When the state of Maine threatens to shut down their island's one-room schoolhouse because of dwindling enrollment, eleven-year-old Tess, a strong believer in luck, and her family take in a trumpet-playing foster child, to increase the school's population.
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Touching Snow
M. Sindy Felin
After her stepfather is arrested for child abuse, thirteen-year-old Karina's home life improves but while the severity of her older sister's injuries and the urging of her younger sister, their uncle, and a friend tempt her to testify against him, her mother and other well-meaning adults pursuade her to claim responsibility.
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Train to Somewhere
Even Bunting
In the late 1800s, Marianne travels westward on the Orphan Train in hopes of being placed with a caring family.
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Transracial Adoption: Children and Parents Speak
Constance Pohl
Explores the issues related to interracial and international adoptions, using interviews with black, biracial, Asian, and Hispanic young people who were adopted into white or biracial families.