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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Tricks (Tricks #1)
Ellen Hopkins
Five teenagers from different parts of the country. Three girls. Two guys. Four straight. One gay. Some rich. Some poor. Some from great families. Some with no one at all. All living their lives as best they can, but all searching…for freedom, safety, community, family, love. What they don’t expect, though, is all that can happen when those powerful little words “I love you” are said for all the wrong reasons.Five moving stories remain separate at first, then interweave to tell a larger, powerful story—a story about making choices, taking leaps of faith, falling down, and growing up. A story about kids figuring out what sex and love are all about, at all costs, while asking themselves, “Can I ever feel okay about myself?”
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Trouper
Meg Kearney
Trooper, a three-legged dog, remembers his life as a stray, before he was adopted.
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True Believer
Virginia Euwer Wolff
Living in the inner city amidst guns and poverty, fifteen-year-old LaVaughn learns from old and new friends, and inspiring mentors, that life is what you make it--an occasion to rise to.
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Truth and Salsa
Linda Lowery
A spirited young girl must travel far from home to finally find herself. Mexico is a long way from Kalamazoo-and not just in terms of miles. Almost-thirteen-year-old Hayley Flynn is spending six months with her eccentric grandmother in the rural mountain town of San Miguel. Her father recently deserted the family and Hayley's mom needs time to, as she puts it, "work things through." Down in Mexico, everyone calls Hayley by her new, more glamorous chosen name, Margarita, and life is surprisingly exciting-exotic birds, beautiful butterflies, holidays, colorful fiestas, and new friends like Lili. Hayley and Lili even win parts as extras in a Hollywood movie being filmed in the town. But there are also difficult lessons to be learned. Poverty and unemployment send Lili's father and other men from the village to Michigan to work as migrant workers so they can send money back home to their anxious families. Meanwhile Hayley is on the lookout for la fantasma (the ghost) that is said to haunt her grandma's house. With Lili's help she solves the mystery-and prepares for a new life with her mom back in the States.
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Two Dads: A Book About Adoption
Carolyn Robertson
Having two dads is double the fun! Many families are different. This family has two dads. A beautifully illustrated, affirming story of life with two dads, written from the perspective of their adopted child.
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Two Homes
Claire Masurel
A young boy named Alex enjoys the homes of both of his parents who live apart but love Alex very much.
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Two Mrs. Gibsons
Toyomi Igus
The biracial daughter of an African American father and a Japanese mother fondly recalls growing up with her mother and her father's mother, two very different but equally loving women.
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Two Naomis
Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich and Audrey Vernick
Other than their first names, Naomi Marie and Naomi Edith are sure they have nothing in common, and they wouldn't mind keeping it that way. Naomi Marie starts clubs at the library and adores being a big sister. Naomi Edith loves quiet Saturdays and hanging with her best friend in her backyard. And while Naomi Marie's father lives a few blocks away, Naomi Edith wonders how she's supposed to get through each day a whole country apart from her mother. When Naomi Marie's mom and Naomi Edith's dad get serious about dating, each girl tries to cling to the life she knows and loves. Then their parents push them into attending a class together, where they might just have to find a way to work with each other--and maybe even join forces to find new ways to define family.
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Two Nests
Laurence Anholt
Two birds build a nest together and hatch a baby bird, but when they fail to get along the father bird moves to a new nest, and though baby bird is unhappy at first, when he learns to fly from nest to nest he sees that the situation isn't that bad.
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Two White Rabbits
Jairo Buitrago and Elisa Amado
A young child describes what it is like to be a migrant as she and her father travel north toward the U.S. border. They travel mostly on the roof of a train known as The Beast, but the little girl doesn't know where they are going. She counts the animals by the road, the clouds in the sky, the stars. Sometimes she sees soldiers. She sleeps, dreaming that she is always on the move, although sometimes they are forced to stop and her father has to earn more money before they can continue their journey.
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Tyler Buckspan
Jere' M. Fishback
Fifteen-year-old Tyler Buckspan lives with his mom and grandmother in 1960s Cassadaga, a Florida community where spiritual "mediums" ply their trade. The mediums--Tyler's grandmother among them--read palms and tarot cards, conduct seances and speak with the dead. Tyler's a loner, a bookish boy with few interests, until his half-brother Devin, nineteen and a convicted arsonist, comes to live in Tyler's home. For years, Tyler has ignored his attraction to other boys. But with Devin in the house, Tyler can't deny his urges any longer. He falls hopelessly in love with his miscreant half-brother, and with the sport of basketball, once Devin teaches Tyler the finer points of the game. In a time when love between men was forbidden, even criminalized, can Tyler find the love he needs from another boy? And is Devin a person to be trusted? Is he truly clairvoyant, or simply a con artist playing Tyler and others for fools? What does Devin really know about a local murder? And can Tyler trust his own psychic twinges?
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Tyrell
Coe Booth
An astonishing new voice in teen literature, writing what is sure to be one of the most talked-about debuts of the year. Tyrell is a young African-American teen who can't get a break. He's living (for now) with his spaced-out mother and little brother in a homeless shelter. His father's in jail. His girlfriend supports him, but he doesn't feel good enough for her? and seems to be always on the verge of doing the wrong thing around her. There's another girl at the homeless shelter who is also after him, although the desires there are complicated. Tyrell feels he needs to score some money to make things better. Will he end up following in his father's footsteps?
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Unbecoming
Jenny Downham
Life has just become very complicated for seventeen-year-old Katie; her father walked out a year ago, her mother is stressed out, her brother is a "special needs" teenager, and she is caring for the maternal grandmother she has never met, who is suffering from Alzheimer's--and Katie has a secret of her own that she cannot reveal.
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Unbelievably Boring Bart
James Patterson and Duane Swierczynski
Invisible creatures are attacking the school and 12-year-old Bartholomew Bean is the only one who can stop them! Okay, so maybe Bart is only a hero in the video game app he created. But if he reveals his identity as the genius behind the game, he'll become the most popular kid in school! Or he could secretly use the game to get back at his bullies. Press Button A- Reveal. Press Button B- Revenge. Which would you choose?
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Uncle Willie and the Soup Kitchen
DyAnn DiSalvo-Ryan
A boy spends the day with Uncle Willie in the soup kitchen where he works preparing and serving food for the hungry.
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Under a Painted Sky
Stacey Lee
All Samantha wanted was to move back to New York and pursue her music, which was difficult enough being a Chinese girl in Missouri, 1849. Then her fate takes a turn for the worse after a tragic accident leaves her with nothing and she breaks the law in self-defense. With help from Annamae, a runaway slave she met at the scene of her crime, the two flee town for the unknown frontier. But life on the Oregon Trail is unsafe for two girls. Disguised as Sammy and Andy, two boys heading for the California gold rush, each search for a link to their past and struggle to avoid any unwanted attention. Until they merge paths with a band of cowboys turned allies, and Samantha can’t stop herself from falling for one. But the law is closing in on them and new setbacks come each day, and the girls will quickly learn there are not many places one can hide on the open trail.
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Under Rose-Tainted Skies
Louise Gornall
Norah has agoraphobia and OCD. When groceries are left on the porch, she can't step out to get them. Struggling to snag the bags with a stick, she meets Luke. He's sweet and funny, and he just caught her fishing for groceries. Because of course he did. Norah can't leave the house, but can she let someone in? As their friendship grows deeper, Norah realizes Luke deserves a normal girl. One who can lie on the front lawn and look up at the stars. One who isn't so screwed up. Can she let him go, or will she find the strength to face her demons?
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Under the Mesquite
Guadalupe Garcia McCall
Throughout her high school years, as her mother battles cancer, Lupita takes on more responsibility for her house and seven younger siblings, while finding refuge in acting and writing poetry.
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Under the Wolf, Under the Dog
Adam Rapp
Sixteen-year-old Steve struggles to make sense of his mother's terminal breast cancer and his brother's suicide.
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Unleashed
Sigmund Brouwer
Jace has taken up boxing on the wrong side of the tracks as he prepares to seek vengeance on his abusive father with two other teen vigilantes.
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Unreachable
Katie Leone
Janice Rosenthal is entering her eighth year of teaching, but it might be her last. Never before has she had a student as unruly and insubordinate as this one. Andrew Bryant is the terror of seventh grade, a student known for driving teachers to the edge of retirement, and he is in her class. How can Janice--and the rest of her students--make it through the school year with such a disruptive force in the classroom? Her only hope is to try to break through the orphan's defenses, to pierce a wall that no other teacher has ever scratched. When she discovers Andrew's secret, two lives will be changed forever.
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Untwine: A Novel
Edwidge Danticat
Identical twin teenagers Giselle and Isabelle Boyer have always been inseparable, and expected to stay that way even though their Haitian American parents are separating--but when when the entire family is caught in a car crash, everyone's world is shattered forever.
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Up From the Sea
Leza Lowitz
A novel in verse about the March 2011 tsunami that sent Japan into chaos, told from the point-of-view of Kai, a biracial teenaged boy. The March 2011 tsunami devastated Kai's coastal Japanese village, and he lost nearly everyone and everything he cares about. When he's offered a trip to New York to meet kids whose lives were changed by 9/11, Kai realizes he also has a chance to look for his estranged American father. Visiting Ground Zero on its tenth anniversary, Kai discovers that the only way to make something good come out of the disaster back home is to return there and help rebuild his town.
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Valentine to a Flying Mouse
Laura Hawkins
During preparations for the fourth grade Valentine party, Tammy meets the wheelchair-bound owner of the local bookstore who helps her learn to cope with her parents' separation and to believe in herself.
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Vanishing Colors
Constance Orbeck Nilssen
As a young girl and her mother take shelter for the night in their war-torn city, the whole world appears muted and dark. When the girl wakes in the middle of the night to find a bird watching her, she knows it’s the one from her mother’s stories, who flies down from the mountains to protect people from harm. She tells the bird what her what her life used to be like, before the war and destruction—she describes her favorite dress, the open market stalls, her dad playing music on the roof. As she continues to remember, colors slowly seep back into her life, and with them comes the courage to hope for a new beginning.