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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Legal Guardianship / Kinship Care

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The Nerdiest, Wimpiest, Dorkiest I Funny Ever (I Funny #6)

James Patterson and Chris Grabenstein

Comedian Jamie Grimm can't help feeling like he's reached the top--he has his own smash hit TV show and he's won a national funny-kid competition. But now he's taking his fame and fortune to international levels by competing in the upcoming world kid comic contest! Will Jamie prove that he's the funniest kid on earth--or does he stand (or sit!) to lose his crown?
The Red Pyramid

Rick Riordan

Brilliant Egyptologist Dr. Julius Kane accidentally unleashes the Egyptian god Set, who banishes the doctor to oblivion and forces his two children to embark on a dangerous journey, bringing them closer to the truth about their family and its links to a secret order that has existed since the time of the pharaohs.
The Red Pyramid: The Graphic Novel

Rick Riordan

Siblings Sadie and Carter Kane discover that the gods of Egypt are waking, and the worst of them?Set?has his sights on them. to Stop him, the duo embarks on a dangerous journey across the globe, one that brings Carter and Sadie ever closer to the truth about their family and its connection to a secret order that has existed since the time of the pharaohs. The heart-stopping action and magic explode off the page in The Red Pyramid, The Graphic Novel, based on the worldwise best-selling novel by Rick Riordan.
The Rules of Survival

Nancy Werlin

Seventeen-year-old Matthew recounts his attempts, starting at a young age, to free himself and his sisters from the grip of their emotionally and physically abusive mother.
The Same Stuff as Stars

Katherine Paterson

When Angel's self-absorbed mother leaves her and her younger brother with their poor great-grandmother, the eleven-year-old girl worries not only about her mother and brother, her imprisoned father, the frail old woman, but also about a mysterious man who begins sharing with her the wonder of the stars.
The Someday Birds

Sally J. Pla

Charlie, twelve, who has autism and obsessive compulsive disorder, must endure a cross-country trip with his siblings and a strange babysitter to visit their father, who will undergo brain surgery.
The Stars at Oktober Bend

Glenda Millard

Alice is fifteen, with hair as red as fire and skin as pale as bone. Something inside Alice is broken: she remembers words but struggles to speak them. Still, Alice knows words are for sharing, so she pins them to posters in tucked-away places: railway waiting rooms, fish-and-chip shops, quiet corners. Manny is sixteen, with a scar from shoulder to elbow. Something inside Manny is broken: he was once a child soldier, forced to do terrible, violent things. But in a new land with new people who will care for him, he spends time exploring on foot. And in his pocket, he carries a poem he scooped up. And he knows the words by heart. When Manny and Alice meet, their relationship brings the beginning of love and healing.
The Summer of the Gypsy Moths

Sara Pennypacker

A foster child named Angel and twelve-year-old Stella, who are living with Stella's great-aunt Louise at the Linger Longer Cottage Colony on Cape Cod, secretly assume responsibility for the vacation rentals when Louise unexpectedly dies and the girls are afraid of being returned to the foster care system.
The Tortilla Quilt

Jane Tenorio-Coscarelli

With color illustrations, quilt pattern and a recipe for tortillas, you too can bring a little of Granma Lupita home with you.
The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle

Leslie Connor

Mason Buttle is the biggest, sweatiest kid in his grade, and everyone knows he can barely read or write. Mason’s learning disabilities are compounded by grief. Fifteen months ago, Mason’s best friend, Benny Kilmartin, turned up dead in the Buttle family’s orchard. An investigation drags on, and Mason, honest as the day is long, can’t understand why Lieutenant Baird won’t believe the story Mason has told about that day. Both Mason and his new friend, tiny Calvin Chumsky, are relentlessly bullied by the other boys in their neighborhood, so they create an underground haven for themselves. When Calvin goes missing, Mason finds himself in trouble again. He’s desperate to figure out what happened to Calvin and, eventually, Benny. But will anyone believe him?
The Window

Michael Dorris

When ten-year-old Rayona's Native American mother enters a treatment facility, her estranged father, a Black man, finally introduces her to his side of the family, who are not at all what she expected.
The Window

Jeanette Ingold

Mandy survived the terrible accident that killed her mother, but she was left blind and alone. Now she lives with relatives she doesn't know, attends a new school, and tries to make friends--all the while struggling to function without sight. Her unpredictable life takes its strangest turn when she begins to hear the oddest things through the window of her attic room. In fact, what she hears--and seems to "see"--are events that happened years ago, before she was even born.
They Chose Me: A Story of Grandparent Adoption

Rhonda Beheler

A little boy learns for the first time how he came to live with and be adopted by his grandparents.
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.
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.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
Vintage: A Ghost Story

Steve Berman

A lonely seventeen-year-old who has dreamed of meeting a different and special boy desperately seeks help from his friend Trace, a Goth girl, to free him from the clutches of a handsome ghost he has met on a rural New Jersey highway.
Walk Two Moons

Sharon Creech

After her mother leaves home suddenly, thirteen-year-old Sal and her grandparents take a car trip retracing her mother's route. Along the way, Sal recounts the story of her friend Phoebe, whose mother also left.
We Are Family

Patricia Hegarty

Explore the differences and similarities of eight families in this gentle, rhyming picture book.
We Are the Ants

Shaun David Hutchinson

Abducted by aliens periodically throughout his youth, Henry Denton is informed by his erstwhile captors that they will end the world in 144 days unless he stops them by deciding that humanity is worth saving.
Welcome to Bordertown

Holly Black and Ellen Kushner

Stories and poems set in the urban land of Bordertown, a city on the edge of the faerie and human world, populated by human and elfin runaways.
What Comes After

Steve Watkins

When her veterinarian father dies, sixteen-year-old Iris Wight must move from Maine to North Carolina where her Aunt Sue spends Iris's small inheritance while abusing her physically and emotionally, but the hardest to take is her mistreatment of the farm animals.