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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Lots of Grandparents
Shelly Rotner and Sheila M. Kelly
Color photographs show grandparents of different ages, ethnic groups, shapes, and sizes sharing happy times with grandchildren.
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Louisiana's Song
Kerry Madden
Set in the Appalachia in 1963, Livy Two has come to terms with the fact that her father is a changed man after being in a coma and so now, along with her eleven-year-old sister, Louisiana, she must find a way to take care of their father and their large mountain family.
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Love
Stacy McAnulty
A sweet and simple story about what love is really all about invites children to find love in everyday moments, from baking cookies with a grandparent to receiving notes in a lunchbox.
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Love and Other Carnivorous Plants
Florence Gonsalves
Freshman year at Harvard was the most anticlimactic year of Danny's life. She's failing pre-med and drifting apart from her best friend. One by one, Danny is losing all the underpinnings of her identity. When she finds herself attracted to an older, edgy girl who she met in rehab for an eating disorder, she finally feels like she might be finding a new sense of self. But when tragedy strikes, her self-destructive tendencies come back to haunt her as she struggles to discover who that self really is.
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Love and Other Four Letter Words
Carolyn Mackler
Sammie never expected sweet sixteen to be perfect, but she didn't expect her parents to separate or to have to move to a tiny apartment in New York. As the hot, hummid summer progresses, she finds new depths to the word "love," and comes to understand other words such as "gain," "loss," and "grow."
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Loved by Two
Tanesha Hopson
Sarah has two mothers and that presents challenges for her at school and in her mind.
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Love Drugged
James Klise
Fifteen-year-old Jamie is dismayed by his attraction to boys, and when a beautiful girl shows an interest in him, he is all the more intrigued by her father's work developing a drug called Rehomoline.
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Love, Hate, and Other Filters
Samira Ahmed
Maya Aziz, seventeen, is caught between her India-born parents' world of college and marrying a suitable Muslim boy and her dream world of film school and dating her classmate, Phil, when a terrorist attack changes her life forever.
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Love in the Corner Pocket
Marlene Perez
Chloe, a Laguna Beach, California, high school student, sorts out questions about her parents' separation and her own friendships and love life as she gets ready to compete in a pool tournament.
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Love Is a Family
Roma Downey
Lily is worried that she and her mother will be the strangest family at the Family Fun Night.
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Love is Love
Michael Genhart
A boy becomes upset when he is teased for having two dads, but viewing his friend's family (with a mom and a dad) as not all that different from his own, he realizes the best way to counter the ridicule is to be proud of who his fathers are and know that it is love that makes a family.
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Love & Lies: Marisol's Story
Ellen Wittlinger
When Marisol, a self-confident eighteen-year-old lesbian, moves to Cambridge, Massachusetts to work and try to write a novel, she falls under the spell of her beautiful but deceitful writing teacher, while also befriending a shy, vulnerable girl from Indiana.
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Lovely
Jess Hong
Big, small, curly, straight, loud, quiet, smooth, wrinkly. Lovely explores a world of differences that all add up to the same thing: we are all lovely!
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Lu
Jason Reynolds
Lu knows he can lead Ghost, Patina, Sunny, and the team to victory at the championships, but it might not be as easy as it seems. Suddenly, there are hurdles in Lu's way--literally and not-so-literally--and Lu needs to figure out, fast, what winning the gold really means--
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Lubna and Pebble
Wendy Meddour
Lubna's best friend is a pebble. Pebble always listens to her stories. Pebble always smiles when she feels scared. But when a lost little boy arrives in the World of Tents, Lubna realizes that he needs Pebble even more than she does. This emotionally stirring and stunningly illustrated picture book explores one girl's powerful act of friendship in the midst of an unknown situation.
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Lucy and Linh
Alice Pung
In Australia, Lucy tries to balance her life at home surrounded by her Chinese immigrant family, with her life at a pretentious private school.
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Lucy Goes to the Country
Joseph Kennedy
Madcap adventures ensue when a gay couple and their cat spend the weekend in the country.
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Lucy Rose, Here's the Thing About Me
Kelly Katy
Eight-year-old Lucy Rose keeps a diary of her first year in Washington, D.C., her home since her parents' separation, where she spends time with her grandparents, makes new friends, and longs to convince her teacher to let her take care of the class pet during a holiday.
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Luna
Julie Anne Peters
Fifteen-year-old Regan's life, which has always revolved around keeping her older brother Liam's transsexuality a secret, changes when Liam decides to start the process of "transitioning" by first telling his family and friends that he is a girl who was born in a boy's body.
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Luv Ya Bunches
Lauren Myracle
Four friends--each named after a flower--navigate the ups and downs of fifth grade. Told through text messages, blog posts, screenplay, and straight narrative.
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Mackenzie, Lost and Found
Deborah Kerbel
After the death of her mother, Mackenzie and her father move to Israel, where she befriends an American girl dealing with a similar tragedy and begins dating a Palestinian boy, which leads to her involvement with a black-market crime ring.
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Macy McMillan and the Rainbow Goddess
Shari Green
Sixth grade is coming to an end, and so is life as Macy McMillan knows it. Already a "For Sale" sign mars the front lawn of her beloved house. Soon her mother will upend their perfect little family, adding a stepfather and six-year-old twin stepsisters. To add insult to injury, what is Macy's final sixth-grade assignment? A genealogy project. Well, she'll put it off - just like those wedding centerpieces she's supposed to be making. Just when Macy's mother ought to be understanding, she sends Macy next door to help eighty-six-year-old Iris Gillan, who is also getting ready to move?in her case into an assisted living facility. Iris can't pack a single box on her own and, worse, she doesn't know sign language. How is Macy supposed to understand her? But Iris has stories to tell, and she isn't going to let Macy's deafness stop her. Soon, through notes and books and cookies, a bond grows between them. And this friendship, odd and unexpected, may be just what Macy needs to face the changes in her life.
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Maddi's Fridge
Lois Brandt
Maddi's fridge is almost empty, while Sophia's fridge is full of food. How can Sophia help her friend Maddi without breaking her promise not to tell anyone?
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Made in China: A Story of Adoption
Vanita Oelschlager
Made in China tells the story of a girl adopted into an American family and the problems she encounters with her older sister. With help from her father, the adopted sister learns the value of her Chinese beginnings. Later the girls accept their differences and embrace the joy that comes from a loving family.
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Made of Stars
Kelley York
When eighteen-year-old Hunter Jackson and his half sister, Ashlin, return to their dad's for the first winter in years, they expect everything to be just like the warmer months they'd spent there as kids. And it is, at first. But Chance, the charismatic and adventurous boy who made their summers epic, is harboring deep secrets. Secrets that are quickly spiraling into something else entirely. The reason they've never met Chance's parents or seen his home is becoming clearer. And what the siblings used to think of as Chance's quirks-the outrageous stories, his clinginess, his dangerous impulsiveness-are now warning signs that something is seriously off. Then someone turns up with a bullet to the head, and all eyes shift to Chance's family. Hunter and Ashlin know Chance is innocent ... they just have to prove it. But how can they protect the boy they both love when they can't trust a word Chance says?