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 Diverse Families by Subject:
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Far from You
Tess Sharpe
Sophie Winters nearly died. Twice. The first time, she's fourteen, and escapes a near-fatal car accident with scars, a bum leg, and an addiction to Oxy that'll take years to kick. The second time, she's seventeen, and it's no accident. Sophie and her best friend Mina are confronted by a masked man in the woods. Sophie survives, but Mina is not so lucky. When the cops deem Mina's murder a drug deal gone wrong, casting partial blame on Sophie, no one will believe the truth: Sophie has been clean for months, and it was Mina who led her into the woods that night for a meeting shrouded in mystery. After a forced stint in rehab, Sophie returns home to a chilly new reality. Mina's brother won't speak to her, her parents fear she'll relapse, old friends have become enemies, and Sophie has to learn how to live without her other half. To make matters worse, no one is looking in the right places and Sophie must search for Mina's murderer on her own. But with every step, Sophie comes closer to revealing all: about herself, about Mina, and about the secret they shared.
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Fast Break
Mike Lupica
Since his mother's death, Jayson, twelve, has focused on basketball and surviving but he is found out and placed with an affluent foster family of a different race, and must learn to accept many changes, including facing his former teammates in a championship game.
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Fat Angie
E.E. Charlton-Trujillo Charlton-Trujillo
Fat Angie's sister was captured in Iraq, she's the resident laughingstock at school, and her therapist tells her to count instead of eat. Can a daring new girl in her life really change anything?
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Father's Day Blues
Irene Smalls-Hector
Cheryl Blues has to write an essay about Father's Day, but since she doesn't live with her father, she consults her grandmother, her aunt, and her mother about fathers.
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Felicia's Favorite Story
Lesléa Newman
It's bedtime, but before Felicia goes to sleep she wants to hear her favorite story, the story of how she was adopted by Mama Nessa and Mama Linda.
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Felix Ever After
Kacen Callender
Felix Love, a transgender seventeen-year-old, attempts to get revenge by catfishing his anonymous bully, but lands in a quasi-love triangle with his former enemy and his best friend.
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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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Fighting for Dontae
Mike Castan
When Mexican American seventh-grader Javier is assigned to work with a special education class and connects with Dontae, who has both physical and mental disabilities, his reputation among gang members and drug abusers no longer seems very important.
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Finding Audrey
Sophie Kinsella
Meet Audrey: an ordinary teenage girl with not so ordinary problems. Aside from her completely crazy and chaotic family, she suffers from an anxiety disorder which makes talking to her brother's hot new best friend a bit of a challenge.
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Finding Joy
Marion Coste
Shu-li, an infant girl who had to be sent away by her family in China, is adopted by an American family and renamed Joy.
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Finding Langston
Lesa Cline-Ransome
Discovering a book of Langston Hughes' poetry in the library helps Langston cope with the loss of his mother, relocating from Alabama to Chicago as part of the Great Migration, and being bullied.
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Finding the Right Spot: When Kids Can't Live with Their Parents
Janice Levy and Whitney Martin
A young girl living with her foster parent describes the emotional ups and downs of being separated from her mother and living in unfamiliar surroundings. Finding the Right Spot is a story for all kids who can't live with their parents, regardless of the circumstances. It's a story about resilience and loyalty, hope and disappointment, love, sadness, and anger, too.
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Find Me
Romily Bernard
When teen hacker and foster child Wick Tate finds a dead classmate's diary on her front step, with a note reading "Find me," she sets off on a perverse game of hide-and-seek to catch the killer.
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Finlater
Shawn Stewart Ruff
In this Lambda Literary Award-winning debut, the course of growing up in just-this-side-of-segregation 1970s Cincinnati, Ohio, seems predictable if uninspiring for Cliffy Douglas. That is, until the deadbeat father of this gifted 13-year-old black kid from the Finlater Gardens Projects appears out of nowhere. The real fun and trouble begin when Noah, a Jewish boy he meets in junior high school, takes him on a joyride to first lust and love.
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Fire Song
Adam Garnet Jones
How can Shane reconcile his feelings for David with his desire for a better life? Shane is still reeling from the suicide of his kid sister, Destiny. How could he have missed the fact that she was so sad? He tries to share his grief with his girlfriend, Tara, but she's too concerned with her own needs to offer him much comfort. What he really wants is to be able to turn to the one person on the rez whom he loves--his friend, David. Things go from bad to worse as Shane's dream of going to university is shattered and his grieving mother withdraws from the world. Worst of all, he and David have to hide their relationship from everyone. Shane feels that his only chance of a better life is moving to Toronto, but David refuses to join him. When yet another tragedy strikes, the two boys have to make difficult choices about their future together. With deep insight into the life of Indigenous people on the reserve, this book masterfully portrays how a community looks to the past for guidance and comfort while fearing a future of poverty and shame.
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First Daughter: Extreme American Makeover
Mitali Perkins
During her father's presidential campaign, sixteen-year-old Sameera Righton, who was adopted from Pakistan at the age of three, struggles with campaign staffers who want to give her a more "all-American" image and create a fake weblog in her name.
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Fish in a Tree
Lynda Mullaly Hunt
Ally has been smart enough to fool a lot of smart people. Every time she lands in a new school, she is able to hide her inability to read by creating clever yet disruptive distractions. She is afraid to ask for help; after all, how can you cure dumb? However, her newest teacher Mr. Daniels sees the bright, creative kid underneath the trouble maker. With his help, Ally learns not to be so hard on herself and that dyslexia is nothing to be ashamed of. As her confidence grows, Ally feels free to be herself and the world starts opening up with possibilities. She discovers that there’s a lot more to her—and to everyone—than a label, and that great minds don’t always think alike.
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Five-Finger Discount
Barthe DeClements
Ten-year-old Jerry's attempts to adjust to his new school and make new friends are complicated by his determination to keep secret the fact that his father is serving time in the local prison for being a thief.
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Five, Six, Seven, Nate!
Tim Federle
Now on Broadway as second understudy for E.T., Nate Foster keeps in close contact with his best friend, Libby, as he faces his nemesis, and his own insecurities as the cast member with the least training and experience.
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Fly Away Home
Eve Bunting
A homeless boy who lives in an airport with his father, moving from terminal to terminal trying not to be noticed, is given hope when a trapped bird finally finds its freedom.
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Flygirl
Sherri L. Smith
During World War II, a light-skinned African American girl "passes" for white in order to join the Women Airforce Service Pilots.
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Flying Free
Jennifer C. Gregg
Narrated by a firefly captured by a five-year-old girl named Violet, who plans to use the firefly as her nightlight. Violet's mommies, Mommy Blue and Mama Red, go along with the idea, but the firefly refuses to live in a glass jar. After several attempts, the firefly devises the ultimate escape plan.
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Fly Little Bird, Fly!: The True Story of Oliver Nordmark & America's Orphan Trains
Donna Nordmark Aviles
Holding tight to one another, vowing never to be separated, Oliver and Edward board the Orphan Train headed west to find a new home.
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Focused
Alyson Gerber
Twelve-year-old Clea wants to do her homework, follow instructions, pay attention in school, and play chess on the school team, but somehow she cannot focus on whatever is in front of her, and the other kids at school are starting to notice and make fun of her; when her worried parents take her to be tested she finds out that she has ADHD (only without the hyperactivity)--and with help from the psychiatrist who seems to really understand her she is determined to learn how to focus.
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For a Muse of Fire
Heidi Heilig
Jetta, a teen who possesses secret, forbidden powers, must gain access to a hidden spring and negotiate a world roiling with intrigue and the beginnings of war.