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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A Brave Spaceboy: Moving is an Adventure!
Dana Kessimakis Smith
On moving day, a little boy bids farewell to his fears by playing pretend: he turns the scary unknown world into an out-of-this-world adventure by handcrafting his own rocket and astronaut outfit for a visit to Mars.
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Adaptation
Malinda Lo
Flocks of birds are hurling themselves at aeroplanes across America. Thousands of people die. On Reese's long drive home, a bird flies into their headlights. The car flips over. When they wake up in a military hospital, the doctor won't tell them what happened. For Reese, though, this is just the start. She can't remember anything from the time between her accident and the day she woke up almost a month later. She only knows one thing: she's different now. Torn between longtime crush David and new girl Amber, the real question is: who can she trust?
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Backwards Day
S. Bear Berman
For one day every year on the planet Tenalp, everything is backwards. Everything. So why didn't Andrea turn into a boy on Backwards Day this year? And why did she turn into a boy the very next day?
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Big Big Sky
Kristyn Dunnion
It is the future. ScanMans, an alien race, invades the warring, poverty stricken, and diseased remains of the Earth. They exterminate all human adults. They recruit orphans for military training in their subterranean, experimental training facility. Rustle is a young scout in a tight-knit female warrior group of five. They're trained to be aggressive, quick thinking, obedient--though for what exact purpose they couldn't quite tell you. But somehow the group is falling apart.
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Coda
Emma Trevayne
Ever since he was a young boy, music has coursed through the veins of eighteen-year-old Anthem; the Corp has certainly seen to that. By encoding music with addictive and mind-altering elements, the Corp holds control over all citizens, particularly conduits like Anthem, whose life energy feeds the main power in the Grid. Anthem finds hope and comfort in the twin siblings he cares for, even as he watches the life drain slowly and painfully from his father. Escape is found in his underground rock band, where music sounds free, clear, and unencoded deep in an abandoned basement. But when a band member dies suspiciously from a tracking overdose, Anthem knows that his time has suddenly become limited. Revolution all but sings in the air, and Anthem cannot help but answer the call with the chords of choice and free will. But will the girl he loves help or hinder him? Emma Trevayne's dystopian debut novel is a little punk, a little rock, and plenty page-turning.
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Dangerous
Shannon Hale
When aspiring astronaut Maisie Danger Brown, who was born without a right hand, and the other space camp students get the opportunity to do something amazing in space, Maisie must prove how dangerous she can be and how far she is willing to go to protect everything she has ever loved.
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Don't Turn Around
Michelle Gagnon
After waking up on an operating table with no memory of how she got there, Noa must team up with computer hacker Peter to stop a corrupt corporation with a deadly secret.
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Felix Yz
Lisa Bunker
Thirteen-year-old Felix Yz chronicles the final month before an experimental procedure meant to separate him from the fourth-dimensional creature, Zyx, with whom he was accidentally fused as a young child.
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Girls of Paper and Fire
Natasha Ngan
When Lei, seventeen, is stolen from her home to become one of nine Paper Girls, the Demon King's concubines, she proves to be more fire than paper.
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Grasshopper Jungle
Andrew Smith
Austin Szerba narrates the end of humanity as he and his best friend Robby accidentally unleash an army of giant, unstoppable bugs and uncover the secrets of a decades-old experiment gone terribly wrong.
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Heart of Iron
Ashley Poston
Seventeen-year-old Ana is a scoundrel by nurture and an outlaw by nature. Found as a child drifting through space with a sentient android called D09, Ana was saved by a fearsome space captain and the grizzled crew she now calls family. But D09 -- one of the last remaining illegal Metals -- has been glitching, and Ana will stop at nothing to find a way to fix him. Ana's desperate effort to save D09 leads her on a quest to steal the coordinates to a lost ship that could offer all the answers. But at the last moment, a spoiled Ironblood boy beats Ana to her prize. He has his own reasons for taking the coordinates, and he doesn't care what he'll sacrifice to keep them. When everything goes wrong, she and the Ironblood end up as fugitives on the run. Now their entire kingdom is after them -- and the coordinates -- and not everyone wants them captured alive. What they find in a lost corner of the universe will change all their lives -- and unearth dangerous secrets. But when a darkness from Ana's past returns, she must face an impossible choice: does she protect a kingdom that wants her dead or save the Metal boy she loves?
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Honor Among Thieves
Rachel Caine and Ann Aguirre
A savvy young criminal with antisocial behavior is recruited to attend the Honors space program and joins a team on a sentient spaceship destined for the far reaches of the galaxy only to discover dangerous secrets hidden among the stars.
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House of Robots: Robot Revolution (House of Robots Series Book 3)
James Patterson
Robots on strike! Sammy's underappreciated mechanical helpers are causing chaos in book 3 of the bestselling House of Robots series
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Inheritance
Malinda Lo
When teens Reese and David are kidnapped after revealing that they were adapted with alien DNA, Reese is forced to reconcile her new love for David, a human, with feelings for Amber, an Imrian, and make a world-changing choice.
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Lizard Radio
Pat Pat Schmatz
Fifteen-year-old bender Kivali, who was deposited on Earth as an infant by mysterious saurians, must discover her true identity in a futuristic society run by an all-powerful government.
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Mask of Shadows
Linsey Miller
Sallot Leon is a thief, and a good one at that. But gender fluid Sal wants nothing more than to escape the drudgery of life as a highway robber and get closer to the upper-class, and to the nobles who destroyed their home. When Sal steals a flyer for an audition to become a member of The Left Hand -- the Queen's personal assassins, named after the rings she wears -- Sal jumps at the chance to infiltrate the court and get revenge. But the audition is a fight to the death filled with clever circus acrobats, lethal apothecaries, and vicious ex-soldiers. A childhood as a common criminal hardly prepared Sal for the trials. And as Sal succeeds in the competition, and wins the heart of Elise, an intriguing scribe at court, they start to dream of a new life and a different future, but one that Sal can have only if they survive.
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More Happy Than Not
Adam Silvera
After enduring his father's suicide, his own suicide attempt, broken friendships, and more in the Bronx projects, Aaron Soto, sixteen, is already considering the Leteo Institute's memory-alteration procedure when his new friendship with Thomas turns to unrequited love.
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More Than This
Patrick Ness
A boy named Seth drowns, losing his life as the pounding sea claims him. But then he wakes. He is naked, thirsty, starving. But alive. How is that possible? He remembers dying. So how is he here? And where is this place? It looks like the suburban English town where he lived as a child, before an unthinkable tragedy happened and his family moved to America. But the neighborhood around his old house is overgrown, covered in dust, and completely abandoned. What's going on? And why is it that whenever he closes his eyes, he falls prey to vivid, agonizing memories that seem more real than the world around him? Seth begins a search for answers, hoping that he might not be alone, trapped in a crumbling, abandoned world.
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On a Sunbeam
Tillie Walden
In two interwoven timelines, a ragtag crew travels to the deepest reaches of space, rebuilding beautiful, broken structures to piece the past together; and two girls meet in boarding school and fall deeply in love, only to learn the pain of loss.
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Opposite of Always
Justin A. Reynolds
After falling for Kate, her unexpected death sends Jack back in time to the moment they first met. He soon learns that his actions have consequences when someone else close to him dies.
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Proxy
Alex London
Privileged Syd and and his proxy, Knox, are thrown together to overthrow the system.
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Quicksilver
R. J. Anderson
To prevent the public from learning about Tori's unusual DNA, technology "geek" Tori and her adoptive parents move to a new town and change their names.
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Runaways, Vol. 1: Find Your Way Home
Rainbow Rowell
When the Runaways eliminate the Pride from Los Angeles, it leaves a vacuum of power in the city's underworld, and soon Nico, Karolina, Gert, Chase, and Molly are on the run again to uncover the truth behind their parents' past before it catches up to them.
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Runaways, Vol. 2: Best Friends Forever
Rainbow Rowell
The Runaways are a family again! But a family needs a guardian, and the only Runaway who's got her life together is in middle school. And, even for a kid like Molly who likes her classes, that can be fraught with peril. Meanwhile, there's a new arrival as the gang welcomes Karolina's girlfriend - Julie Power of Power Pack! Having an experienced adventurer around will be useful when one of the universe's most fearsome villains invades the hostel! But do some of the Runaways have mixed feelings about Julie's arrival? As Molly contemplates a supernatural deal that must have a monkey's paw-esque downside, one of the team suff ers a fate worse than death. Really! And will the Runaways' greatest foe be...well-meaning outsiders who want to help them?!
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Saga, Volume One
Brian K. Vaughan
When two soldiers from opposite sides of a never-ending galactic war fall in love, they risk everything to bring a fragile new life into a dangerous old universe.