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 Health & Disability:
Physical Disability
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Walking Eagle: The Little Comanche Boy
Ana Eulate and Jon Brokenbrow
A Comanche boy named Walking Eagle tells tales without words, using his hands, his face, his smile, and his eyes to communicate with animals and the people of other tribes that he meets on his journey.
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Waterbound
Jane Stemp
In a futuristic society sixteen-year-old Gem discovers that a group of handicapped people who call themselves the Waterbound live hidden beneath the City.
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We Are Family
Patricia Hegarty
Explore the differences and similarities of eight families in this gentle, rhyming picture book.
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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.
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We're All Wonders
R. J. Palacio
Augie enjoys the company of his dog, Daisy, and using his imagination, but painfully endures the taunts of his peers because of his facial deformity.
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What's Wrong with Timmy?
Maria Shriver
Making friends with a mentally retarded boy helps Kate learn that the two of them have a lot in common.
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What We Keep is Not Always What Will Stay
Amanda Cockrell
Angie never used to think much about God—until things started getting strange. Like the statue of St. Felix, her secret confidant, suddenly coming off his pedestal and talking to her. And Jesse Francis, sent home from Afghanistan at age nineteen with his leg blown off. Now he's expected to finish high school and fit right back in. Is God even paying attention to this? Against the advice of St. Felix (who knows a thing or two about war), Angie falls for Jesse—who's a lot deeper than most high school guys. But Jesse is battling some major demons. As his behavior starts to become unpredictable, and even dangerous, Angie finds herself losing control of the situation. And she's starting to wonder...can one person ever make things right for someone else?
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What Would Joey Do?
Jack Gantos
Joey's dad just roared into town on a motorcycle, his mom is chasing her ex-husband away with a broomstick, and his grandma's camped out on the couch behind a plastic shower curtain. What's more, Joey's chihuahua has been dognapped, and his mom insists that he be homeschooled with a mean blind girl and her super-religious mother. Welcome to Joey's world. With his new self-assumed role as "Mr. Helpful," Joey's on a mission to make everything and everyone better. Can Joey accomplish all this or will his wild, wired behavior spin him out of control all over again?
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When Charley Met Emma
Amy Webb
Five-year-old Charley gets teased for daydreaming and drawing more than his friends, but when he meets Emma, who is physically different, he needs help remembering that being different is okay.
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Who's In My Family?: All About Our Families
Robie H. Harris
Nellie and her little brother Gus discuss all kinds of families during a day at the zoo and dinner at home with their relatives afterwards.
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Wild Blues
Beth Kephart
Thirteen-year-old Lizzie relates, through a victim statement, her harrowing journey through the Adirondacks seeking her disabled friend, Matias, who was kidnapped by escaped convicts.
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Willow King
Chris Platt
Thirteen-year-old Katie, who is herself physically challenged, saves a crippled foal from euthanasia and nurses him back to health and eventual championships.
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Willow King: Race the Wind
Chris Platt
Determined to ride her horse in the Kentucky Derby despite her physical handicap, Katie overcomes great obstacles and even helps a blind girl face her own kind of challenge.
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Wintering Well
Lea Wait
Twelve-year-old Will Ames and his sister Cassie go to stay with their sister in nearby Wiscasset, Maine, after a disabling accident ruins Will's plans for a career in farming.
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Wired Man and Other Freaks of Nature
Sashi Kaufman
Ben has to wear hearing aids, but being inseparable from the super-popular Tyler allows him to think of himself as normal. But Tyler blows him off senior year and Ben needs to rethink who he is--and who Tyler is.
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With the Wind
Liz Damrell
When a boy who spends most of his time in a wheelchair rides a horse, he finds freedom, power, joy, and strength.
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Wonder
R. J. Palacio
Ten-year-old Auggie Pullman, who was born with extreme facial abnormalities and was not expected to survive, goes from being home-schooled to entering fifth grade at a private middle school in Manhattan, which entails enduring the taunting and fear of his classmates as he struggles to be seen as just another student.
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Yes I Can!: A Girl and Her Wheelchair
Kendra J. Barrett, Jacqueline B. Toner, and Claire A. B. Freeland
Carolyn is in a wheelchair, but she doesn't let that stop her! She can do almost everything the other kids can, even if sometimes she has to do it a little differently.
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You're Welcome, Universe
Whitney Gardner
When Julia finds a slur about her best friend scrawled across the back of the Kingston School for the Deaf, she covers it up with a beautiful (albeit illegal) graffiti mural. Her supposed best friend snitches, the principal expels her, and her two mothers set Julia up with a one-way ticket to a "mainstream" school in the suburbs, where she's treated like an outcast as the only deaf student. The last thing she has left is her art, and not even Banksy himself could convince her to give that up. Out in the 'burbs, Julia paints anywhere she can, eager to claim some turf of her own. But Julia soon learns that she might not be the only vandal in town. Someone is adding to her tags, making them better, showing off--and showing Julia up in the process. She expected her art might get painted over by cops. But she never imagined getting dragged into a full-blown graffiti war.
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Yuko-chan and the Daruma Doll: The Adventures of a Blind Japanese Girl Who Saves Her Village
Sunny Seki
After the 1783 eruption of Japan's Mount Asama destroys crops in nearby villages, an orphaned blind girl who lives at the Daruma Temple in Takasaki invents a doll representing a famed Buddhist monk and his teachings about resilience.
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Zoom!
Robert Munsch
When Lauretta tries out a 92-speed, silver and gold, dirt-bike wheelchair, she gets a speeding ticket but also helps out her brother.