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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Roving Pack
Sassafras Lowrey
Click, a straight-edge transgender kid, is searching for hir place within a pack of newly sober gender rebels in the dilapidated punk houses of Portland, Oregon circa 2002. Ze embarks on a dizzying whirlwind of leather, sex, hormones, house parties, and protests until hir gender fluidity takes an unexpected turn and the pack is sent reeling.
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Roxy the Raccoon: A Story to Help Children Learn about Disability and Inclusion
Alice Reeves
Roxy lives in the forest with her three best friends, who she loves to visit and play games with. Roxy is in a wheelchair, so sometimes it is harder for her to go to the same places and play the same games as the other animals. Roxy and her friends realise that by making a few small changes and working together, they can make the forest a better place for everyone. Roxy teaches us that there are bunches of ways to be more inclusive of those who have a disability so that everyone can join in.
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Rubyfruit Jungle
Rita Mae Brown
A landmark coming-of-age novel that launched the career of one of this country’s most distinctive voices, Rubyfruit Jungle remains a transformative work more than forty years after its original publication. In bawdy, moving prose, Rita Mae Brown tells the story of Molly Bolt, the adoptive daughter of a dirt-poor Southern couple who boldly forges her own path in America. With her startling beauty and crackling wit, Molly finds that women are drawn to her wherever she goes—and she refuses to apologize for loving them back. This literary milestone continues to resonate with its message about being true to yourself and, against the odds, living happily ever after.
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Ruby Lu, Empress of Everything
Lenore Look
After Ruby Lu's deaf cousin, Flying Duck, and her parents come from China to live with her, Ruby finds life challenging as she adjusts to her new family, tries to mend her rocky relationship with her friend Emma, and faces various adventures in summer school.
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Ruby on the Outside
Nora Raleigh Baskin
Eleven-year-old Ruby Danes has a real best friend for the first time ever, but agonizes over whether or not to tell her a secret she has never shared with anyone--that her mother has been in prison since Ruby was five--and over whether to express her anger to her mother.
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Ruby, the Red-Hot Witch at Bloomingdale's
Marlene Fanta Shyer
When Ruby, the witch who works at Bloomingdale's, cures her younger brother's nervous hiccups, thirteen-year-old Petra wonders if Ruby's magic can get her separated parents back together.
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Rules
Cynthia Lord
Twelve-year-old Catherine just wants a normal life. Which is near impossible when you have a brother with autism and a family that revolves around his disability. She's spent years trying to teach David the rules from "a peach is not a funny-looking apple" to "keep your pants on in public"--In order to head off David's embarrassing behaviours. But the summer Catherine meets Jason, a surprising, new sort-of-friend, and Kristi, the potential next-door friend she's always wished for, it's her own shocking behaviour that turns everything upside down and forces her to ask: What is normal?
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Rumplepimple
Suzanne DeWitt Hall
Life isn't easy when your big sister is an annoying cat and your moms can't understand a word you say. But that doesn't stop Rumplepimple from saving the day in a most unusual way. Find out how a car ride transforms a naughty terrier into a grocery store hero.
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Runaway!
Janet Willig
After leaving home because her drunken father frequently beats her, fourteen-year-old Jodie tries out a couple of foster homes and eventually finds peace with a loving Christian family.
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Runaway Twin
Peg Kehret
Thirteen-year-old Sunny, accompanied by a stray dog, takes advantage of a windfall to travel from her Nebraska foster home to Enumclaw, Washington, to find the twin sister from whom she was separated at age three.
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Run, Clarissa, Run
Rachel Eliason
Life in a small town can be tough when you're a little different, but for a fifteen year old transgender kid it can truly be hell. Clark is harassed daily at school for his effeminate behavior and appearance. He has no friends and a brother that is as likely to be on the teasing as to prevent it. When Clark is offered a job babysitting for the Pirella family, it seems like a godsend. The money is good. He bonds with the girls almost instantly. The father, Tony, works in computer security. Tony and Clark strike up a friendship based on a mutal love of computers and hacking. As Tony becomes aware of Clark's transsexuality and his growing feminine alter ego, Clarissa, things become incredibly complicated. Will Tony be Clarissa's salvation, or her undoing?
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Running on Empty
S. E. Durrant
After his grandfather dies, eleven-year-old JJ, a talented runner, assumes new responsibilities including taking care of his intellectually-challenged parents and figuring out how bills get paid.
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Ryan's Mom is Tall
Heather Jopling
Ryan's Mom and Mummy are different in many ways. See how their family puzzle fits together! This comparative book of opposites highlights the differences between Ryan's Mom and Mummy while using a puzzle motif to create a picture of families in the new millennium.
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Saddle Sore
Bonnie Bryant
The girls of the Saddle Club have headed West to the Bar None Ranch. This time they've brought their friend, Emily, who has cerebral palsy. Emily is going to help the ranch's owner make it accessible to riders with special needs. Then the four girls meet a guest their own age. She's a former rider who has lost part of her leg in a motorbike accident. She doesn't plan to get on a horse ever again.
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Sadie
Courtney Summers
Sadie hasn't had an easy life. Growing up on her own, she's been raising her sister Mattie in an isolated small town, trying her best to provide a normal life and keep their heads above water. But when Mattie is found dead, Sadie's entire world crumbles. After a somewhat botched police investigation, Sadie is determined to bring her sister's killer to justice and hits the road following a few meager clues to find him. When West McCray - a radio personality working on a segment about small, forgotten towns in America - overhears Sadie's story at a local gas station, he becomes obsessed with finding the missing girl. He starts his own podcast as he tracks Sadie's journey, trying to figure out what happened, hoping to find her before it's too late.
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Saffron Ice Cream
Rashin Kheiriyeh
Rashin is an Iranian immigrant girl living in New York, excited by her first trip to Coney Island, and fascinated by the differences in the beach customs between her native Iran and her new home--but she misses the saffron flavored ice cream that she used to eat.
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Saint Iggy
K. L. Going
Iggy Corso, who lives in city public housing, is caught physically and spiritually between good and bad when he is kicked out of high school, goes searching for his missing mother, and causes his friend to get involved with the same dangerous drug dealer who deals to his parents.
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Saints and Misfits
S. K. Ali
Fifteen-year-old Janna Yusuf, a Flannery O'Connor-obsessed book nerd and the daughter of the only divorced mother at their mosque, tries to make sense of the events that follow when her best friend's cousin--a holy star in the Muslim community--attempts to assault her at the end of sophomore year.
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Sammy Goes Flying
Odette Elliott
Sammy dreams of flying. His older siblings are going on a school trip to an aeroplane museum. But Sammy is too small to go. Then Grandma plans a magical day out just for Sammy.
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Sammy Wakes His Dad
Chip Emmons
Sammy's father, who is in a wheelchair, is reluctant to join Sammy in going fishing, until his son's love finally moves him to action.
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Samurai Kids 1: White Crane
Sandy Fussell
Even though he has only one leg, Niya Moto is studying to be a samurai, and his five fellow-students are similarly burdened, but sensei Ki-Yaga, an ancient but legendary warrior, teaches them not only physical skills but mental and spiritual ones as well, so that they are well-equipped to face their most formidable opponents at the annual Samurai Games.
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Sarah's Sleepover
Bobbie Rodriguez
Sarah and her cousins are all set for a sleepover weekend complete with hot chocolate, pillow fights, and ghost stories—until the power goes out in a storm and plunges them into total darkness. Sarah isn't worried. She is able to guide the rest of the girls safely through the pitch-black house because she is comfortable moving in the dark; Sarah is blind.
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Saturday is Pattyday
Lesléa Newman
Although Frankie is hurt and confused when his two mommies separate, he is comforted by knowing that Patty will still be part of his life.
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Saturdays with Hitchcock
Ellen Wittlinger
Twelve-year-old Maisie feels that she has enough complications in her life: her actor uncle has moved in with her family while he recovers from an accident and her father is not pleased, her grandmother is slipping into dementia but wants to remarry, her mom has been laid off, and her best friend Cyrus, with whom she spends Saturdays watching classic movies, has revealed that he is gay--but Gary, the boy he has a crush on, seems more attracted to Maisie herself.
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Save the Date
Morgan Matson
When seventeen-year-old Charlie Grant's four older siblings reunite for a wedding, she is determined they will have a perfect weekend before the family home is sold, but last-minute disasters abound.