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.

Browse by Family Relationship:

Separation

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Sibling Split: Trouble in the City

M. G. Higgins

Now that summer is over and school is beginning separated siblings Annabelle and Arnie are struggling to cope with the reality of life apart--but when Annabelle comes to her mother and brother's apartment in the city a lot of repressed emotion suddenly overflows.
Sister Split

Sally Warner

When her parents separate, eleven-year-old Ivy must cope not only with their impending divorce, but also with the unexpected impact it has on her relationship with her older sister.
Skin

Adrienne Maria Vrettos

You don't have to be thin to feel small. Donnie's life is unraveling. His parents' marriage is falling apart, and his sister is slowly slipping away in the grip of her illness. To top it all off, he accidentally starts a rumor at school that hurts someone he cares about and leaves him an outcast. So Donnie does the only thing he knows how to do: He tries to fix things, to make everything the way it was before. Before his parents stopped loving each other, before his sister disappeared, before he was alone. But some things are beyond repair, and it will take all Donnie's strength to stop looking back and start moving forward again.
Somos como las nubes / We Are Like the Clouds

Jorge Argueta

Poems describe the experiences of young Central Americans as they leave the dangers of their own countries to undertake the risky journey north to seek relative safety in the United States.
Stinky

Ted Staunton

Janice, who really wants to be know as Greer, is a little overweight and more than a little bossy when it comes to struggling to be heard at school. The fact that her parents are separated and she spends half her life living in a trailer at the edge of town visited by skunks that don't hesitate to spray if they hear a sudden noise does not help her self-confidence. Janice wants to get her parents back together in time for her birthday, but this proves harder than she realizes.
Stranded

Ben Mikaelsen

Twelve-year-old Koby, who has lost a foot in an accident, sees a chance to prove her self-reliance to her parents when she tries to rescue two stranded pilot whales near her home in the Florida Keys.
Stranded in Boringsville

Catherine Bateson

Following her parents' separation, twelve-year-old Rain moves with her mother to the country, where she befriends the unpopular boy who lives next door and also seeks a way to cope with her feelings toward her father and his new girlfriend.
Strawberry Moon

Karen English

While driving to Auntie Dot's house, Junie tells her children about spending fifth grade there during her parent's separation many years earlier, when finding a best friend seemed almost as important as seeing her mother again.
Suckerpunch

David Hernandez

Shy, seventeen-year-old Marcus and his sixteen-year-old brother, Enrique, accompanied by two friends, drive from their home in southern California to Monterey to confront the abusive father who walked out a year earlier, and who now wants to return home.
Sunshine Picklelime

Pamela Ferguson

PJ Picklelime can talk to birds, hear bells ringing in a woman's curls, and spot moonbows in the night sky, but when a close friend dies and her parents separate, she searches for understanding and a way to recover her sunshine.
Tell Me

Joan Bauer

Feeling scared and powerless when her father's anger escalates and her parents separate, twelve-year-old Anna spends the summer with her grandmother and decides to make a difference when she sees what seems to be a girl held against her will.
Terror at Bottle Creek

Watt Key

Thirteen-year-old Cort's father is a local expert on hunting and swamp lore in lower Alabama who has been teaching his son everything he knows. But when a deadly Gulf Coast hurricane makes landfall, Cort must unexpectedly put his all skills--and bravery--to the test.
The 12 Dares of Christa

Marissa Burt

Thirteen-year-old Christa's plans for her favorite holiday are derailed when her parents announce their divorce and Christa spends Christmas in Europe with her mom, but even though her dad remains in Chicago, he sends Christa on a scavenger hunt made up of dares that send her all over Florence, Paris, and London.
The Arrival

Shaun Tan

In this wordless graphic novel, a man leaves his homeland and sets off for a new country, where he must build a new life for himself and his family.
The Best of Both Nests

Jane Clarke

One day, Mrs. Stork tells Stanley that Dad is going to fly off and build his own nest. At school, Stanley worries about Dad missing Fathers' Flyday Friday. But his friend Stella tells him, "Two nests are better than one."
The Big Split

Rowan McAuley

When their parents decide to separate, Holly and her sister Faith are really upset. Can they still be a family if their mum and dad aren't married anymore?
The Cardboard Kingdom

Chad Sell

Welcome to a neighborhood of kids who transform ordinary boxes into colorful costumes, and their ordinary block into cardboard kingdom. This is the summer when sixteen kids encounter knights and rogues, robots and monsters—and their own inner demons—on one last quest before school starts again. In the Cardboard Kingdom, you can be anything you want to be—imagine that! The Cardboard Kingdom was created, organized, and drawn by Chad Sell with writing from ten other authors: Jay Fuller, David DeMeo, Katie Schenkel, Kris Moore, Molly Muldoon, Vid Alliger, Manuel Betancourt, Michael Cole, Cloud Jacobs, and Barbara Perez Marquez. The Cardboard Kingdom affirms the power of imagination and play during the most important years of adolescent identity-searching and emotional growth.
The Day War Came

Nicola Davies

The day war came there were flowers on the windowsill and my father sang my baby brother back to sleep. Imagine if, on an ordinary day, after a morning of studying tadpoles and drawing birds at school, war came to your town and turned it to rubble. Imagine if you lost everything and everyone, and you had to make a dangerous journey all alone. Imagine that there was no welcome at the end, and no room for you to even take a seat at school. And then a child, just like you, gave you something ordinary but so very, very precious. In lyrical, deeply affecting language, Nicola Davies’s text combines with Rebecca Cobb’s expressive illustrations to evoke the experience of a child who sees war take away all that she knows.
The Friends

Kazumi Yumoto

Curious about death, three sixth-grade boys decide to spy on an old man waiting for him to die, but they end up becoming his friends.
The Great American Whatever

Tim Federle

Teenaged Quinn, an aspiring screenwriter, copes with his sister's death while his best friend forces him back out into the world to face his reality.
The Great Shelby Holmes

Elizabeth Eulberg

Nine-year-old Shelby Holmes, the best detective in her Harlem neighborhood, and her new easy-going friend from downstairs, eleven-year-old John Watson, become partners in a dog-napping case.
The Hidden World of Changers #3 The Power Within

H.K. Varian

Darren, Fiona, Mack, and Gabriella are Changers, a magical line of shapeshifters that can transform into mythological creatures, from werewolves and selkies to lightning birds and spirit foxes. They still have a lot to learn when it comes to their powers, but the kids are finally showing some progress fighting as a team, and the First Four think they're ready for a new mission. Young Changers in the area have been mysteriously disappearing, and it's up to the kids to figure out who-or what's behind it. But ever since his parents announced their divorce, Darren has been having a rough time coping-and his lightning abilities are going haywire.
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.
The Missing Manatee

Cynthia DeFelice

All Skeet Waters wants is to catch a big, beautiful tarpon on his fly rod - and to keep everything else in his life in Florida the way it's always been. But on his spring break from school, Skeet overhears his mother telling his father to move out permanently. Then, while riding in his boat to escape his parents' troubles, he discovers a manatee that's been shot in the head. Skeet puts aside his search for the manatee and its killer when Dirty Dan the Tarpon Man offers to take him out to catch his first tarpon on a fly. Because of Dan, Skeet begins to unravel the mysteries surrounding the manatee's apparent murder and his parents' dissolving marriage. Skeet discovers that life is a lot like tarpon fishing, in which you can't look just at the surface of the water - you have to look through it, at what lies beneath.
The Porcupine of Truth

Bill Konigsberg

Carson Smith isn't thrilled to be spending the summer with her estranged dad in Billings, Montana. But then he meets Aisha Stinson, the most beautiful girl he's ever seen. And the smartest. And the funniest. They connect like he never has with anyone. Also she's a lesbian. So there's that. Carson's dad is still bitter about the disappearance of his dad more than thirty years earlier. When Carson and Aisha discover a box full of cards from his grandfather, some of them recent, they realize the old man is still out there somewhere. What are two bored teenagers in the middle of nowhere to do? So Carson and Aisha begin a journey with no destination, to find a man who wanted to be lost, in an unreliable Dodge Neon, with one very prickly mascot. And what comes next is an extraordinary, enlightening, hilarious, inspiring, complete and utter mindblower of a road trip that will transform both their lives.