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.

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It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health

Robie H. Harris

Introduces human sexuality, describes the changes brought about by puberty, and discusses sexual abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, AIDS, and pregnancy.
It's So Amazing!: A Book About Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families

Robbie H. Harris

Uses bird and bee cartoon characters to present straightforward explanations of topics related to sexual development, love, reproduction, adoption, sexually transmitted diseases, and more.
Jim's Lion

Russel Hoban

Asleep in his hospital bed, Jim dreams of a great lion with white teeth and amber eyes. This lion is Jim’s finder. According to Nurse Bami, everyone has a finder, a creature who comes looking for us when we are lost. But when the time comes for Jim’s operation, will his lion be able to find him and bring him safely home?
Jodie's Journey

Colin Thiele

Twelve-year-old Jodie, disabled by juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and no longer able to ride her beloved horse Monarch, faces a crisis when the two of them are alone at her remote Australia home and a devastating fire approaches.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Odd & True

Cat Winters

Trudchen grew up hearing Odette’s stories of their monster-slaying mother and a magician’s curse. But now that Tru’s older, she’s starting to wonder if her older sister’s tales were just comforting lies, especially because there’s nothing fantastic about her own life—permanently disabled and in constant pain from childhood polio. In 1909, after a two-year absence, Od reappears with a suitcase supposedly full of weapons and a promise to rescue Tru from the monsters on their way to attack her. But it’s Od who seems haunted by something. And when the sisters’ search for their mother leads them to a face-off with the Leeds Devil, a nightmarish beast that’s wreaking havoc in the Mid-Atlantic states, Tru discovers the peculiar possibility that she and her sister—despite their dark pasts and ordinary appearances—might, indeed, have magic after all.
Opposite of Always

Justin A. Reynolds

After falling for Kate, her unexpected death sends Jack back in time to the moment they first met. He soon learns that his actions have consequences when someone else close to him dies.
Owning It: Stories About Teens with Disabilities

Donald R. Gallo

Presents ten stories of teenagers facing all of the usual challenges of school, parents, boyfriends and girlfriends, plus the additional complications that come with having a physical or psychological disability.
Playing a Part

Daria Wilke and Marian Schwartz

Grishka has grown up in the closed world of a puppet theater in Russia, but now that world seems to be falling apart--his best friend needs an operation, financial difficulties are forcing people out, his homosexual friend Sam, the jester, is leaving for Holland and Grishka no longer knows what role he himself is playing.
Postcards to Father Abraham

Catherine Lewis

When sixteen-year-old Meghan loses her leg to cancer and her brother to Vietnam, she expresses intense anger in postcards which she writes to her idol, Abraham Lincoln.
Punkzilla

Adam Rapp

"Punkzilla" is on a mission to see his older brother "P", before "P" dies of cancer. Still buzzing from his last hit of meth, he embarks on a days-long trip from Portland, Ore. to Memphis, Tenn., writing letters to his family and friends. Along the way, he sees a sketchier side of America and worries if he will make it to see his brother in time.
Saturdays with Hitchcock

Ellen Wittlinger

Twelve-year-old Maisie feels that she has enough complications in her life: her actor uncle has moved in with her family while he recovers from an accident and her father is not pleased, her grandmother is slipping into dementia but wants to remarry, her mom has been laid off, and her best friend Cyrus, with whom she spends Saturdays watching classic movies, has revealed that he is gay--but Gary, the boy he has a crush on, seems more attracted to Maisie herself.
Stitches

David Small

One day David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had cancer and was expected to die. Believing that they were trying to do their best, David’s parents did just the reverse. Edward Small, a Detroit physician, who vented his own anger by hitting a punching bag, was convinced that he could cure his young son’s respiratory problems with heavy doses of radiation, possibly causing David’s cancer. Elizabeth, David’s mother, tyrannically stingy and excessively scolding, ran the Small household under a cone of silence where emotions, especially her own, were hidden.
Surviving the City

Tasha Spillett

Tasha Spillet's graphic-novel debut, Surviving the City, is a story about womanhood, friendship, resilience, and the anguish of a missing loved one. Miikwan and Dez are best friends. Miikwan's Anishinaabe; Dez is Inninew. Together, the teens navigate the challenges of growing up in an urban landscape - they're so close, they even completed their Berry Fast together. However, when Dez's grandmother becomes too sick, Dez is told she can't stay with her anymore. With the threat of a group home looming, Dez can't bring herself to go home and disappears. Miikwan is devastated, and the wound of her missing mother resurfaces. Will Dez's community find her before it's too late? Will Miikwan be able to cope if they don't?
Sweet Tooth: A Memoir

Tim Anderson

What's a sweets-loving young boy growing up gay in North Carolina in the eighties supposed to think when he's diagnosed with type 1 diabetes? That God is punishing him, naturally. This was, after all, when gay-hating Jesse Helms was his senator, AIDS was still the boogeyman, and no one was saying, "It gets better." And if stealing a copy of a gay porno magazine from the newsagent was a sin, then surely what the men inside were doing to one another was much worse. Sweet Tooth is Tim Anderson's uproarious memoir of life after his hormones and blood sugar both went berserk at the age of fifteen. With Morrissey and The Smiths as the soundtrack, Anderson self-deprecatingly recalls love affairs with vests and donuts, first crushes, coming out, and inaugural trips to gay bars. What emerges is the story of a young man trying to build a future that won't involve crippling loneliness or losing a foot to his disease--and maybe even one that, no matter how unpredictable, can still be pretty sweet.
The Beauty That Remains

Ashley Woodfolk

Autumn, Shay, and Logan, whose lives intersect in complicated ways, each lose someone close to them and must work through their grief.
The Call

Peadar O'Guilin

3 minutes and 4 seconds. The length of time every teenager is 'Called', from the moment they vanish to the moment they reappear. 9 out of 10 children return dead. Even the survivors are changed. The nation must survive. Nessa, Megan and Anto are at a training school -- to give them some chance to fight back. Their enemy is brutal and unforgiving. But Nessa is determined to come back alive. Determined to prove that her polio-twisted legs won't get her killed. But her enemies don't just live in the Grey Land. There are people closer to home who will go to any length to see her, and the nation, fail.
The Elementals

Saundra Mitchell

In 1917, Kate Witherspoon, who has lived a bohemian life with her artist parents, goes to Los Angeles where she meets crippled midwestern farm boy Julian Birch, another runaway, and together they realize they have the ability to triumph over death and time.
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.
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.