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 LGBTQ:
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Emma and Meesha My Boy: A Two Mom Story
Kaitlyn Considine
Emma lives with her two moms and a chubby housecat. Follow along as Emma gets in trouble while trying to play with Meesha Kitty; and cheer as she learns to treat him with care.
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Empress of the World
Sara Ryan
While attending a summer institute for gifted students, fifteen-year-old Nic meets a girl named Battle, falls in love with her, and finds the relationship to be difficult and confusing.
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Everything Leads to You
Nina LaCour
After being entrusted with her brother's Los Angeles apartment for the summer as a graduation gift, Emi Price isn't sure how to fulfill his one condition: that something great take place there while he's gone. Emi may be a talented young production designer, already beginning to thrive in the competitive film industry, but she still feels like an average teen, floundering when it comes to romance. But when she and her best friend, Charlotte, discover a mysterious letter at the estate sale of a Hollywood film legend, Emi must move beyond the walls of her carefully crafted world to chase down the loose ends of a movie icon's hidden life, leading her to uncover a decades' old secret and the potential for something truly epic: love.
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Everything Under
Daisy Johnson
The dictionary doesn’t contain every word. Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, knows this better than most. She grew up on a houseboat with her mother, wandering the canals of Oxford and speaking a private language of their own invention. Her mother disappeared when Gretel was a teen, abandoning her to foster care, and Gretel has tried to move on, spending her days updating dictionary entries. One phone call from her mother is all it takes for the past to come rushing back. To find her, Gretel will have to recover buried memories of her final, fateful winter on the canals. A runaway boy had found community and shelter with them, and all three were haunted by their past and stalked by an ominous creature lurking in the canal: the bonak. Everything and nothing at once, the bonak was Gretel’s name for the thing she feared most. And now that she’s searching for her mother, she’ll have to face it.
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Evil?
Timothy Carter
Stuart Bradley, a gay teenager living in a conservative Christian town in Ontario, Canada, dabbles in several forbidden activities, and when word gets out, he and some other teens face grave danger from the fallen angels that are inciting hatred and extremism in the community.
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Extraordinary Birds
Sandy Stark-McGinnis
Eleven-year-old December waits to sprout wings and fly away, until a new foster mother changes her perspective on home and family.--
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Families
Susan Kuklin
In frank interviews, children from fifteen different types of families talk about the ups and downs of their home lives and offer a look at diversity in American society
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Families
Shelley Rotner and Sheila M. Kelly
Big or small, similar or different-looking, there are all kinds of families. Some have one parent, some have two, and many include extended family. This inclusive look at many varieties of families will help young readers see beyond their own immediate experiences.
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Families
Meredith Tax
Realities such as divorce, stepfamilies, adoption, single parenting, and gay and lesbian parenting are explored through the curious, affectionate, and nonjudgemental eyes of six-year-old Angie as she introduces readers to her multicultural groups of friends, who are loved and cared for within many different types of families.
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Families: A Celebration of Diversity, Commitment, and Love
Aylette Jenness
Photographs and text depict the lives of seventeen families from around the country, some with step relationships, divorce, gay parents, foster siblings, and other diverse components. The material was originally a traveling exhibition, begun at the Children's Museum in Boston.
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Families: A Coloring Book
Michael Willhoite
A coloring book depicting traditional and nontraditional families.
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Families, Families, Families!
Suzanne Lang
A host of animals portrays all kinds of non-traditional families.
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Families of Value: Gay and Lesbian Parents and Their Children Speak Out
Jane Drucker
Drawing upon stories by and about nearly two dozen families in which gay fathers and lesbian mothers are raising children in a wide variety of settings and styles, the author defines the meaning of family and discusses concerns such as interpersonal relationships, sexual and psychological development, coming out, facing prejudice, and finding a spiritual foundation, the lesson being that children thrive in an environment of love regardless of the number, gender, or sexual orientation of the adults who provide it.
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Families of Value: Personal Profiles of Pioneering Lesbian and Gay Parents
Robert Bernstein
Families of Value offers a poignant defense of families with same-sex parents. Former attorney and award-winning author Robert Bernstein tells powerful stories of families with gay and lesbian parents who are at the forefront of social change in America. By turns hard-hitting and affecting, these stories portray the resistance these brave parents have faced, their views of the current cultural climate, and, most importantly, the intense passion and dedication that they have demonstrated in the course of raising sound, healthy, and well-adjusted children.
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Fans of the Impossible Life
Kate Kate Scelsa
At Saint Francis Prep school in Mountain View, New Jersey, Mira, Jeremy, and Sebby come together as they struggle with romance, bullying, foster home and family problems, and mental health issues.
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Far from the Tree
Robin Benway
Grace, adopted at birth, is raised as an only child. At sixteen she's just put her own baby up for adoption, and now is looking for her biological family. She discovers Maya, her loudmouthed younger bio sister who was also adopted; and Joaquin, their stoic older bio brother, who has no interest in bonding over their shared biological mother after seventeen years in the foster care system. Grace struggles between cautious joy at having found them, and the true meaning of family in all its forms.
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Far from Xanadu
Julie Anne Peters
In this fresh, poignant novel Mike is struggling to come to terms with her father's suicide and her mother's detachment from her family. Mike (real name Mary Elizabeth) is gay and likes to pump iron, play softball and fix plumbing. When a glamorous new girl, Xanadu, arrives in Mike's small Kansas town, she falls in love at first sight. Xanadu is everything that Mike is not - cool, confident, feminine, sexy and - straight! No matter how close their growing friendship is, Mike is always going to be 'far from Xanadu'.
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Far from You
Tess Sharpe
Sophie Winters nearly died. Twice. The first time, she's fourteen, and escapes a near-fatal car accident with scars, a bum leg, and an addiction to Oxy that'll take years to kick. The second time, she's seventeen, and it's no accident. Sophie and her best friend Mina are confronted by a masked man in the woods. Sophie survives, but Mina is not so lucky. When the cops deem Mina's murder a drug deal gone wrong, casting partial blame on Sophie, no one will believe the truth: Sophie has been clean for months, and it was Mina who led her into the woods that night for a meeting shrouded in mystery. After a forced stint in rehab, Sophie returns home to a chilly new reality. Mina's brother won't speak to her, her parents fear she'll relapse, old friends have become enemies, and Sophie has to learn how to live without her other half. To make matters worse, no one is looking in the right places and Sophie must search for Mina's murderer on her own. But with every step, Sophie comes closer to revealing all: about herself, about Mina, and about the secret they shared.
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Fat Angie
E.E. Charlton-Trujillo Charlton-Trujillo
Fat Angie's sister was captured in Iraq, she's the resident laughingstock at school, and her therapist tells her to count instead of eat. Can a daring new girl in her life really change anything?
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Felicia's Favorite Story
Lesléa Newman
It's bedtime, but before Felicia goes to sleep she wants to hear her favorite story, the story of how she was adopted by Mama Nessa and Mama Linda.
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Felix Ever After
Kacen Callender
Felix Love, a transgender seventeen-year-old, attempts to get revenge by catfishing his anonymous bully, but lands in a quasi-love triangle with his former enemy and his best friend.
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Felix Yz
Lisa Bunker
Thirteen-year-old Felix Yz chronicles the final month before an experimental procedure meant to separate him from the fourth-dimensional creature, Zyx, with whom he was accidentally fused as a young child.
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Finlater
Shawn Stewart Ruff
In this Lambda Literary Award-winning debut, the course of growing up in just-this-side-of-segregation 1970s Cincinnati, Ohio, seems predictable if uninspiring for Cliffy Douglas. That is, until the deadbeat father of this gifted 13-year-old black kid from the Finlater Gardens Projects appears out of nowhere. The real fun and trouble begin when Noah, a Jewish boy he meets in junior high school, takes him on a joyride to first lust and love.
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Fire Song
Adam Garnet Jones
How can Shane reconcile his feelings for David with his desire for a better life? Shane is still reeling from the suicide of his kid sister, Destiny. How could he have missed the fact that she was so sad? He tries to share his grief with his girlfriend, Tara, but she's too concerned with her own needs to offer him much comfort. What he really wants is to be able to turn to the one person on the rez whom he loves--his friend, David. Things go from bad to worse as Shane's dream of going to university is shattered and his grieving mother withdraws from the world. Worst of all, he and David have to hide their relationship from everyone. Shane feels that his only chance of a better life is moving to Toronto, but David refuses to join him. When yet another tragedy strikes, the two boys have to make difficult choices about their future together. With deep insight into the life of Indigenous people on the reserve, this book masterfully portrays how a community looks to the past for guidance and comfort while fearing a future of poverty and shame.
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Five, Six, Seven, Nate!
Tim Federle
Now on Broadway as second understudy for E.T., Nate Foster keeps in close contact with his best friend, Libby, as he faces his nemesis, and his own insecurities as the cast member with the least training and experience.