This collection contains materials from the DIVerse Families bibliography organized by format.
DIVerse Families is a comprehensive bibliography that demonstrates the growing diversity of families in the United States. This type of bibliography provides teachers, librarians, counselors, adoption agencies, children/young adults, and especially parents and grandparents needing to empower their children with materials that reflect their families.
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Hooper
Geoff Herbach
For Adam Reed, basketball is a passport. Adam’s basketball skills have taken him from an orphanage in Poland to a loving adoptive mother in Minnesota. When he’s tapped to play on a select AAU team along with some of the best players in the state, it just confirms that basketball is his ticket to the good life: to new friendships, to the girl of his dreams, to a better future. But life is more complicated off the court. When an incident with the police threatens to break apart the bonds Adam’s finally formed after a lifetime of struggle, he must make an impossible choice between his new family and the sport that’s given him everything.
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How I Became a Writer and Oggie Learned to Drive
Janet Taylor Lisle
A young writer's fantasy world becomes dangerously entangled with reality. Eleven-year-old Archie and his six-year-old brother, Oggie, are constantly going back and forth between their mother's home and the apartment that their father shares with his girlfriend. To distract Oggie from the turbulence of endlessly bouncing from "Saturn" to "Jupiter" and back again, Archie invents a fantastic story about the Mysterious Mole People. When Oggie's wallet is stolen by kids from a local gang, Archie tries to retrieve it and becomes increasingly ensnared in the gang's dangerous activities. Even worse, he soon finds that his fictitious mole story is merging with the darkness of real life in a very frightening way.
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How I Saved My Father's Life (And Ruined Everything Else)
Ann Hood
After her father leaves and marries the glamorous Ava Pomme, Madeline blames her mother for their difficult new life, but in spite of the twelve-year-old's efforts to achieve sainthood, it takes a summer trip to Italy to put her family into perspective.
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How It Feels to Float
Helen Fox
A gutting, profound, deeply hopeful portrayal of living with mental illness and grief, this modern-day Bell Jar marks the arrival of an exceptional new talent in the YA space. Biz knows how to float. She has her people, her posse, her mom and the twins. She has Grace. And she has her dad, who tells her about the little kid she was, who loves her so hard, and who shouldn't be here but is. So Biz doesn't tell anyone anything. Not about her dark, runaway thoughts, not about kissing Grace or noticing Jasper, the new boy. And she doesn't tell anyone about her dad. Because her dad died when she was six. And Biz knows how to float, right there on the surface--normal okay regular fine. But after what happens on the beach--first in the ocean, and then in the sand--the tethers that hold Biz steady come undone. Dad disappears, and with him, all comfort. It might be easier, better, sweeter to float all the way away? Or maybe stay a little longer, find her father, bring him back to her. Or maybe--maybe maybe maybe--there's a third way Biz just can't see yet. In this mesmerizing, radiant debut, Helena Fox tells a story about love and grief and family and friendship, about inter-generational mental illness, and how living with it is both a bridge to someone loved and lost and also a chasm. She explores the hard, bewildering, and beautiful places loss can take us, and honors those who hold us tightly when the current wants to tug us out to sea.
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How (Not) to Ask a Boy to Prom
S.J. Goslee
When his older sister encourages him to ask someone to the prom, things do not go as planned and Nolan ends up fake dating a guy who used to bully him.
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How to Keep Rolling After a Fall
Karole Cozzo
Mean girl Nikki Baylor, accused of a cyberbullying incident that nearly resulted in a classmate's suicide, is expelled from school, abandoned by her friends, and distrusted by her parents but she gets a second chance after meeting Pax, a spirited wheelchair rugby player.
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How to Save a Life
Sara Zarr
Told from their own viewpoints, seventeen-year-old Jill, in grief over the loss of her father, and Mandy, nearly nineteen, are thrown together when Jill's mother agrees to adopt Mandy's unborn child but nothing turns out as they had anticipated.
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How to Survive a Summer
Nick White
A debut novel centering around a gay conversion camp in Mississippi and a man's reckoning with the trauma he faced there as a teen.
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Huntress
Malinda Lo
Seventeen-year-olds Kaede and Taisin are called to go on a dangerous and unprecedented journey to Tanlili, the city of the Fairy Queen, in an effort to restore the balance of nature in the human world.
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Hurricane Child
Kheryn Callender
Born on Water Island in the Virgin Islands during a hurricane, which is considered bad luck, twelve-year-old Caroline falls in love with another girl--and together they set out in a hurricane to find Caroline's missing mother.
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Hurt Go Happy
Ginny Rorby
When thirteen-year-old Joey Willis, deaf since the age of six, meets Dr. Charles Mansell and his chimpanzee Sukari, who use sign language, her world blooms with possibilities but that of the chimp begins to narrow.
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Hush Puppy
Lisa Cresswell
Intelligent Corrine, abandoned by her mother, and artsy Jamie, forced to play football by a redneck father, both dream of leaving their podunk town and never looking back. Their shared love of literature and a dream of a better life bring them together and a romance blossoms between them in a secret place of their own in the steamy North Carolina woods. When Jamie is involved in the accidental death of a white girl, he's terrified of his abusive father. Corrine takes the blame to protect Jaime, with dire consequences for herself and her dreams of the future. Her life in danger, Corrine's left wondering if Jamie ever cared about her at all.
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I am J
Cris Beam
J, who feels like a boy mistakenly born as a girl, runs away from his best friend who has rejected him and the parents he thinks do not understand him when he finally decides that it is time to be who he really is.
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I Am Nuchu
Brenda Stanley
Upon his parents' 1981 divorce, Cal Burton goes from being a popular, comfortable Spokane basketball all-star to a resident of a Ute Indian reservation in Utah, where apathy, poor living conditions, racism, and bitterness over a decades-old family tragedy change his life.
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I Believe in a Thing Called Love
Maureen Goo
Desi Lee never had a B in her entire life.But-- she's a disaster in romance, and her botched attempts at flirting have become legendary with her friends. So when the hottest human specimen to have ever lived walks into her life one day, Desi decides to tackle her flirting failures with the same zest she's applied to everything else in her life.
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I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain
Will Walton
For most of his young life Avery has dealt with his alcoholic mother with the help of his grandfather Pal--he immerses himself in poetry and popular music, and now that high school is over for the summer, he makes out with his best friend Luca (who understands about alcoholic mothers), but the death of his grandfather creates a hole in his life that he can not seem to crawl out of.
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If I Ever Get Out of Here
Eric L. Gansworth
Seventh-grader Lewis "Shoe" Blake from the Tuscarora Reservation has a new friend, George Haddonfield from the local Air Force base, but in 1975 upstate New York there is a lot of tension and hatred between Native Americans and Whites--and Lewis is not sure that he can rely on friendship.
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If I Lie
Corrine Jackson
Seventeen-year-old Sophie Quinn becomes an outcast in her small military town when she chooses to keep a secret for her Marine boyfriend who is missing in action in Afghanistan.
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If I Tell
Janet Gurtler
Raised by her grandparents, seventeen-year-old Jasmine, the result of a biracial one night stand, has never met her father but has a good relationship with her mother until she sees her mother's boyfriend kissing Jaz's best friend.
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If I Told You So
Timothy Woodward
Sean Jackson is sixteen and his choice is either to take a landscaping job in Georgia with his father, or to stay in his small New Hampshire hometown and take a job at the local ice cream shop. He stays home and deals with the pressures of a young man who struggles with trying to tell his father that he is gay.
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If I Was Your Girl
Meredith Russo
Amanda Hardy only wants to fit in at her new school, but she is keeping a big secret, so when she falls for Grant, guarded Amanda finds herself yearning to share with him everything about herself, including her previous life as Andrew.
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If Only
Jennifer Gilmore
At sixteen Bridget is pregnant--and her boyfriend has dumped her for another girl. She's trying to envision a future for her baby. But as she sifts through the many paths and the many people who want to parent her child, she can't help but feel that there is no right decision. Fifteen years later: Ivy knows that she is now the same age Bridget was when she placed Ivy for adoption. She knows that Bridget was the one who named her. When Ivy goes in search of Bridget--of her own history--will the risks outweigh the benefits of knowing where she comes from and why her birth mother chose to walk away?
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I Funny: A Middle School Story
James Patterson and Chris Grabenstein
Resolving to become the world's greatest stand-up comedian despite less-than-funny challenges in his life, wheelchair-bound middle school student Jamie Grimm endures bullying from his mean-spirited cousin and hopes he will be fairly judged when he enters a local comedy contest.
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If You Come Softly
Jacqueline Woodson
After meeting at their private school in New York, fifteen-year-old Jeremiah, who is black and whose parents are separated, and Ellie, who is white and whose mother has twice abandoned her, fall in love and then try to cope with people's reactions.
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If You Could be Mine: A Novel
Sara Farizan
In Iran, where homosexuality is punishable by death, seventeen-year-olds Sahar and Nasrin love each other in secret until Nasrin's parents announce their daughter's arranged marriage and Sahar proposes a drastic solution.