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.
This collection contains materials from the DIVerse Families bibliography organized by genre.
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.
Browse by Genre:
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Everett Anderson's Goodbye
Lucille Clifton
Everett Anderson has a difficult time coming to terms with his grief after his father dies.
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Everything, Everything
Nicola Yoon
The story of a teenage girl who's literally allergic to the outside world. When a new family moves in next door, she begins a complicated romance that challenges everything she's ever known. The narrative unfolds via vignettes, diary entries, texts, charts, lists, illustrations, and more.
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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 on a Waffle
Polly Horvath
Eleven-year-old Primrose living in a small fishing village in British Columbia recounts her experiences and all that she learns about human nature and the unpredictability of life in the months after her parents are lost at sea.
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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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Every Turtle Counts
Sara Hoagland Hunter
When seven-year-old Mimi finds a frozen sea turtle on the beach, she refuses to believe that it will die.
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Every Year on Your Birthday
Rose A. Lewis
Each year on the birthday of her adopted Chinese daughter, a mother recalls the moments they have shared, from the first toy to the friends left behind in China.
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Excellent Emma
Sally Warner
Emma McGraw's third-grade class is getting ready for Winter Games Day, and Emma wants to win a prize more than anything. It would be the perfect way to make her father proud. But the rest of the class has mixed feelings about Winter Games Day. Jared is desperate to be the fastest runner and the farthest jumper, Fiona is worried about her weak ankles, and Annie Pat doesn't seem to care at all. When the big day arrives, nothing goes exactly as planned, but Emma is still determined to be as excellent as she can be.
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Exclusively Chloe
J. A. Yang
In the public eye since she was adopted as a baby from China by her Hollywood celebrity parents, sixteen-year-old Chloe-Grace, longing for a "normal" life," undergoes a transformation with the help of her mother's stylist and finds not only the life she wanted but an important key to her past.
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Extra Innings
Robert Newton Peck
After a tragic airplane crash that claims the lives of most of his family, sixteen-year-old Tate goes to live with his wealthy great-grandfather and his adopted black great-aunt Vidalia and he finds unexpected solace in the stories of her childhood spent travelling with a Depression-era Negro baseball team.
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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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Fade to Us
Julia Day
Brooke's summer is going to be EPIC -- having fun with her friends and a job that lets her buy a car. Then her new stepfather announces his daughter is moving in. Brooke has always longed for a sibling, so she's excited about spending more time with her stepsister. But she worries, too. Natalie has Asperger's--and Brooke's not sure how to be the big sister that Natalie needs. After Natalie joins a musical theater program, Brooke sacrifices her job to volunteer for the backstage crew. She's mostly there for Natalie, but Brooke soon discovers how much she enjoys being part of the show. Especially sweet is the chance to work closely with charming and fascinating Micah--the production's stage manager. When her summer finally comes to an end, will Brooke finally have the family she so desperately wants--and the love she's only dreamed about?
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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 Coloring Book
Michael Willhoite
A coloring book depicting traditional and nontraditional families.
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Families are Different
Nina Pellegrini
An adopted Korean girl discovers that her classmates have different types of families
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Families are Forever
Craig Shemin
Rain meets Bo and her new "forever" Mom and they become a brand new family. Families are Forever is a heartwarming tale about family love and beginnings. The story introduces Rain, a nearly six year old Chinese-American adopted girl, and tells how she found her 'forever family,' a single mother in America.
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Families, Families, Families!
Suzanne Lang
A host of animals portrays all kinds of non-traditional families.
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Family
Isabell Monk
Hope's new and unusual dessert blends well with the traditional dishes prepared by her cousins and Aunt Poogee at their annual summer get-together.
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Fangirl
Rainbow Rowell
Being consummate fans of the Simon Snow series helped Cath and her twin sister, Wren, cope as little girls whose mother left them, but now, as they start college but not as roommates, Cath fears she is unready to live without Wren holding her hand--and without her passion for Snow.
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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 Apart, Close in Heart: Being a Family When a Loved One is Incarcerated
Becky Birtha
Children from all walks of life experience various emotions when their parent is in jail or prison, but they learn there are ways to communicate their feelings that will help improve their situation and remind them they are not alone.
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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 the Tree
Virginia Deberry and Donna Grant
Two African-American sisters, Celeste, a doctor's wife trying to maintain a facade of normalcy, and Ronnie, a struggling actress, inherit a North Carolina house at the death of their father and face a painful encounter with long- suppressed family secrets.
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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.