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 Upside of Unrequited
Becky Albertalli
Seventeen-year-old Molly Peskin-Suso knows all about unrequited love. No matter how many times her twin sister, Cassie, tells her to woman up, Molly can't stomach the idea of rejection. So she's careful. Fat girls always have to be careful. Then a cute new girl enters Cassie's orbit, and for the first time ever, Molly's cynical twin is a lovesick mess. Meanwhile, Molly's totally not dying of loneliness -- except for the part where she is. Luckily, Cassie's new girlfriend comes with a cute hipster-boy sidekick. If Molly can win him over, she'll get her first kiss and she'll get her twin back. There's only one problem: Molly's coworker, Reid. He's a chubby Tolkien superfan with a season pass to the Ren Faire, and there's absolutely no way Molly could fall for him. Right?
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The Vast Fields of Ordinary
Nick Burd
It's Dade's last summer at home, and things are pretty hopeless. He has a crappy job, a "boyfriend" who treats him like dirt, and his parents' marriage is falling apart. So when he meets and falls in love with the mysterious Alex Kincaid, Dade feels like he's finally experiencing true happiness. But when a tragedy shatters the final days of summer, he realizes he must face his future and learn how to move forward from his past.
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The Very Kind Koala: A Surrogacy Story for Children
Kimberly Kluger-Bell
The Very Kind Koala is a charming picture book for young children which provides an introduction to surrogacy through the simple story of a koala bear and her husband who needed the help of a very kind koala to carry their baby in her pouch. Parents can begin reading this story to children as young as 3 years of age to begin the dialog about their own helpful surrogate.
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The Visit
S. Latisha Herbert
A description of a visit of a child in foster care with her other siblings in separate foster homes.
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The Wall
William Sutcliffe
In an isolated town that closely resembles the West Bank, thirteen-year-old Joshua discovers that his world may not be as it seems; that his people may be aggressors rather than victims; and that he must stand up to his stepfather and forge his own sense of right and wrong.
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The Weight of a Thousand Feathers
Brian Conaghan
Seventeen-year-old Bobby Seed, the devoted but exhausted primary caregiver for his terminally-ill mother and difficult younger brother, finds respite in a support group and good friends, but must face his mother's impossible choice alone
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The White Swan Express
Elaine M. Aoki and Jean Davies Okimoto
Across North America, people in four different homes prepare for a special trip to China, while four baby girls in China await their new adoptive parents.
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The Window
Michael Dorris
When ten-year-old Rayona's Native American mother enters a treatment facility, her estranged father, a Black man, finally introduces her to his side of the family, who are not at all what she expected.
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The World of Normal Boys
K.M. Soehnlein
The time is the late 1970s -- an age of gas shortages, head shops, and Saturday Night Fever. The place, suburban New Jersey. At a time when the teenagers around him are coming of age, Robin MacKenzie is coming undone. While "normal boys" are into cars, sports, and bullying their classmates, Robin enjoys day trips to New York City with his elegant mother, spinning fantastic tales for her amusement in an intimate ritual he has come to love. He dutifully plays the role of the good son for his meat-and-potatoes father, even as his own mind is a jumble of sexual confusion and painful self-doubt. But everything changes in one horrifying instant, when a tragic accident wakes his family from their middle-American dream and plunges them into a spiral of slow destruction.
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They Chose Me: A Story of Grandparent Adoption
Rhonda Beheler
A little boy learns for the first time how he came to live with and be adopted by his grandparents.
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The Year I Didn't Eat
Samuel Pollen
Fourteen-year-old Max records his efforts to control his anorexia in a therapist-prescribed journal that also chronicles his parents' difficult relationship and his feelings for a new girl at school, Evie.
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The Year of the Baby
Andrea Cheng
Anna and her best friends Laura and Camille return in an engaging new story. Anna's family has adopted a new baby from China, but her new sister is not thriving and refuses to eat. When Anna and her friends are assigned a science experiment in school, they decide to use the assignment as a way to help Baby Kaylee.
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The Year of the Fortune Cookie
Andrea Cheng
Eleven-year-old Anna takes a trip to China and learns more about herself and her Chinese heritage.
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The Year of the Perfect Christmas
Gloria Houston
Ruthie and her mother wonder how they will fulfill their obligation of getting the perfect Christmas tree to the town for the holiday celebration, since Papa has left the Appalachian area to go to war.
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The Year the Swallows Came Early
Kathryn Fitzmaurice
After her father is sent to jail, eleven-year-old Groovy Robinson must decide if she can forgive the failings of someone she loves.
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They Never Came Back
Caroline B. Cooney
When fifteen-year-old Cathy decides to carpool from Norwalk to tony Greenwich, Connecticut, to study Latin in summer school, she does not expect the shocking events that occured five years earlier to suddenly come flooding back into her relatively settled life.
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Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry
Susan Vaught
A family mystery leads Dani Beans to investigate the secrets of Ole Miss and the dark history of race relations in Oxford, Mississippi.
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This Day in June
Gayle E. Pitman
A picture book illustrating a Pride parade. The endmatter serves as a primer on LGBT history and culture and explains the references made in the story.
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This is Kind of an Epic Love Story
Kheryn Callender
Budding screenwriter Nate, sixteen, finds his conviction that happy endings do not happen in real life sorely tested when his childhood best friend and crush, Oliver James Hernandez, moves back to town
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This Side of Home
Reneé Watson
Twins Nikki and Maya Younger always agreed on most things, but as they head into their senior year they react differently to the gentrification of their Portland, Oregon neighborhood and the new--white--family that moves in after their best friend and her mother are evicted.
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Those Shoes
Maribeth Boelts
Jeremy, who longs to have the black high tops that everyone at school seems to have but his grandmother cannot afford, is excited when he sees them for sale in a thrift shop and decides to buy them even though they're the wrong size.
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Three Little Words
Sarah N. Harvey
When Sid leaves his foster family on their remote island home in search of the mother he doesn't remember and a brother he's never met, he's ill-prepared for the surprises he finds.
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Three Names of Me
Mary Cummings
A girl adopted from China explains that her three names--one her birth mother whispered in her ear, one the babysitters at her orphanage called her, and one her American parents gave her--are each an important part of who she is. Includes scrapbooking ideas for other girls adopted from China.
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Three Pennies
Melanie Crowder
In San Francisco, eleven-year-old Marin desperately searches for her birthmother knowing time is running out before she is adopted, and discovers for the first time in her life what it feels like to be truly wanted by someone.
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Through Moon and Stars and Night Skies
Ann Turner
A boy who came from far away to be adopted by a couple in this country remembers how unfamiliar and frightening some of the things were in his new home, before he accepted the love to be found there.