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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The History of Us
Nyrae Dawn
Eighteen-year-old Bradley Collins came out a year ago and hasn't looked back since. Who cares if he doesn't know any other gay people? Bradley has friends and basketball -- that's all he needs. Even if that means always sitting on the sidelines when the guys go out looking for girls. When cute film-boy TJ tries to flirt with Bradley while his friends are doing their thing, he freaks. Yeah, he's gay, but he's never had the opportunity to go out with a boy before. He's never had to worry about how his friends will react to seeing him with a guy. Bradley accompanies TJ on a road trip to film TJ's senior project documentary. In each city they visit, they meet with people from different walks of life, and Bradley learns there's a whole lot more to being honest about himself than just coming out. He still has to figure out who he really is and learn to be okay with what he discovers.
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The Hour Between
Sebastian Stuart
Arthur McDougal's parents ship him off to the Christian Science boarding school the Spooner School in Connecticut after he is kicked out of Manhattan's toniest boys' school. There he struggles with his sexuality and makes friends with the beautiful and troubled Katrina Felt, the daughter of a Hollywood movie star.
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The House on Mango Street
Sandra Cisneros
For Esperanza, a young girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, life is an endless landscape of concrete and run-down tenements, and she tries to rise above the hopelessness.
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The House You Pass on the Way
Jacqueline Woodson
When thirteen-year-old Staggerlee, the daughter of a racially mixed marriage, spends a summer with her cousin Trout, she begins to question her sexuality to Trout and catches a glimpse of her possible future self. Thirteen-year-old Staggerlee used to be called Evangeline, but she took on a fiercer name. She's always been different--set apart by the tragic deaths of her grandparents in an anti-civil rights bombing, by her parents' interracial marriage, and by her family's retreat from the world. This summer she has a new reason to feel set apart--her confused longing for her friend Hazel. When cousin Trout comes to stay, she gives Staggerlee a first glimpse of her possible future selves and the world beyond childhood.
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The Impossible Patriotism Project
Linda Skeers
Caleb has a hard time coming up with a way to symbolize patriotism for Presidents' Day until he realizes that his dad, who is away from home in the military, is what patriotism is all about.
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The Inexplicable Logic of My Life
Benjamin Alire Saenz
A story set on the American border with Mexico, about family and friendship, life and death, and one teen struggling to understand what his adoption does and doesn't mean about who he is.
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The Journey
Francesca Sanna
With haunting echoes of the current refugee crisis, this beautifully illustrated book explores the unimaginable decisions made as a family leave their home and everything they know to escape the turmoil and tragedy brought by war. This book will stay with you long after the last page is turned.
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The Key to Every Thing
Pat Schmatz
For eleven-year-old Tash, Cap’n Jackie isn’t just the elderly next-door neighbor — she’s family. When she disappears, only Tash holds the key that might bring her back.Tash didn’t want to go to camp, didn’t want to spend the summer with a bunch of strangers, didn’t want to be separated from the only two people she has ever been able to count on: her uncle Kevin, who saved her from foster care, and Cap’n Jackie, who lives next door. Camp turns out to be pretty fun, actually, but when Tash returns home, Cap’n Jackie is gone. And Tash needs her — the made-up stories of dolphin-dragons, the warm cookies that made everything all right after a fight, the key Cap’n Jackie always insisted had magic in it. The Captain always said all Tash had to do was hold it tight and the magic would come. Was it true? Could the key bring Cap’n Jackie back?
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The Knish War on Rivington Street
Joanne Oppenheim
Benny's family owns a knishery and sells delicious round dumplings. Then the Tisch family opens a store across the street-selling square knishes-and Benny's papa worries. So he lowers his prices! But Mr. Tisch does too. As each knishery tries to outdo the other, Benny helps his papa realize there's room on Rivington Street for more than one knishery.
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The Lady in the Box
Ann McGovern
It is wintertime in the city and freezing cold, but not everyone is inside and warm. Ben and his sister Lizzie know that there is a lady who lives outside in a box over a warm air vent. Gently told and powerfully illustrated in rich hues, The Lady in the Box deals candidly with the issue of homelessness.
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The Land
Mildred D. Taylor
After the Civil War, Paul, the son of a white father and a black mother, finds himself caught between the two worlds of colored folks and white folks as he pursues his dream of owning land of his own.
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The Landry News
Andrew Clements
The bad news is that Cara Landry is the new kid at Denton Elementary School. The worse news is that her teacher, Mr. Larson, would rather read the paper and drink coffee than teach his students anything. So Cara decides to give Mr. Larson something else to read: her own newspaper, The Landry News. Before she knows it, the whole fifth-grade class is in on the project. But then the principal finds a copy of The Landry News, with unexpected results. Tomorrow's headline: Will Cara's newspaper cost Mr. Larson his job?
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The Last Exit to Normal
Michael B. Harmon
After moving from Spokane, Washington, to a small Montana town with his father and his father's boyfriend, Ben notices that something is not quite right with the little boy next door and determines to do something about it.
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The Last Summer of the Garrett Girls
Jessica Spotswood
Told through four viewpoints, sisters Des, Bea, Kat, and Vi, aged nineteen to fifteen, are each transformed, especially in how they see one another, in the last summer before Bea leaves for college.
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The Last to Let Go
Amber Smith
When her mother is arrested for killing Brooke's abusive father, Brooke must confront the shadow of her family's violence and dysfunction.
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The Last True Love Story
Brendan Kiely
Hendrix and Corrina bust Hendrix's grandfather out of assisted living, and leave LA for New York in pursuit of freedom, truth, and love.
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The Latte Rebellion
Sarah Jamila Stevenson
When high school senior Asha Jamison is called a "towel head" at a pool party, she and her best friend Carey start a club to raise awareness of mixed-race students that soon sweeps the country, but the hubbub puts her Ivy League dreams, friendship, and beliefs to the test.
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The Length of a String
Elissa Brent Weissman
Imani knows exactly what she wants as her big bat mitzvah gift: to find her birth parents. She loves her family and her Jewish community in Baltimore, but she has always wondered where she came from, especially since she's black and almost everyone she knows is white. Then her mom's grandmother--Imani's great-grandma Anna--passes away, and Imani discovers an old journal among her books. It's Anna's diary from 1941, the year she was twelve and fled Nazi-occupied Luxembourg alone, sent by her parents to seek refuge in Brooklyn, New York. Anna's diary records her journey to America and her new life with an adoptive family of her own. And as Imani reads the diary, she begins to see her family, and her place in it, in a whole new way.
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The Less-Dead
April Lurie
Sixteen-year-old Noah Nordstrom, whose father is the host of a popular evangelical Christian radio program, believes that the person who has been killing gay teenagers in the Austin, Texas, foster care system, is a regular caller on his dad's show.
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The Lines We Cross
Randa Abdel-Fattah
Michael's parents are leaders of a new anti-immigrant political party called Aussie Values which is trying to halt the flood of refugees from the Middle East; Mina fled Afghanistan with her family ten years ago, and just wants to concentrate on fitting in and getting into college--but the mutual attraction they feel demands that they come to terms with their family's concerns and decide where they stand in the ugly anti-Muslim politics of the time.
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The Line Tender
Kate Allen
Wherever the sharks led, Lucy Everhart's marine-biologist mother was sure to follow. In fact, she was on a boat far off the coast of Massachusetts, collecting shark data when she died suddenly. Lucy was seven. Since then Lucy and her father have kept their heads above water—thanks in large part to a few close friends and neighbors. But June of her twelfth summer brings more than the end of school and a heat wave to sleepy Rockport. On one steamy day, the tide brings a great white—and then another tragedy, cutting short a friendship everyone insists was "meaningful" but no one can tell Lucy what it all meant. To survive the fresh wave of grief, Lucy must grab the line that connects her depressed father, a stubborn fisherman, and a curious old widower to her mother's unfinished research on the Great White's return to Cape Cod. If Lucy can find a way to help this unlikely quartet follow the sharks her mother loved, she'll finally be able to look beyond what she's lost and toward what's left to be discovered.
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The Little Green Goose
Adele Sansone and J. Alison James
Mr. Goose finds an abandoned egg, hatches it, and raises a peculiar green-skinned long-tailed chick, who worries about his identity but comes to recognize that he has a loving parent.
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The Lopez Family: Science Fair Day
Monica Bey-Clarke and Cheril N. Clarke
The Lopez Family: Science Fair Day is the first story in a fun series featuring Felix Lopez and his two dads. We are introduced to a family of scientists who love to invent new things like robots and Super Magic Glue. This story takes you on a journey as Felix learns how to cope in difficult situations, and he teaches children life lessons by his examples. Felix invents a remote control airplane for his school's science fair contest. Throughout the book, Felix encounters various obstacles, but he finds ways to overcome his challenges with the help, love, and support of his two dads. This tale touches upon subjects such as bullying, not giving up, and reinforces basic moral values such as honesty and integrity. Through this affectionate story, Felix shows children that it's okay to be themselves and to always keep a positive attitude even when times seem rough.
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The Lost Marble Notebook of Forgotten Girl and Random Boy
Maria Jaskulka
Forgotten Girl is going through the most difficult time of her life-- the breakup of her parents, and her mom's resulting depression. She meets Random Boy, a hot guy who, like her, feels like an outcast and secretly writes poetry to deal with everything going on in his life. They come from opposite sides of the tracks, yet they find understanding in each other when they lay bare their life stories through the poetry they write and share with each other.
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The Lost Treasures for the Orphans
Carol Blazer
This adventure is about Mason, his two dads & his grandma. The story begins with a young boy realizing how much he has. Through a reporter, the family learns about a local orphanage. These children neither have parents, grandparents, toys, or clothing of their own. Mason has an idea! He wants to share what he has with the orphans. Through this experience he learns the gift of giving.