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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Sisters
Judith Caseley
Kika has just been adopted -- and she's worried. There's so much that's new to her: a different language, new friends to make, and something she's never had before -- a family. Melissa has a new sister -- and she's excited. There's so much to share with Kika: trips to the playground, afternoons at the library, and birthday parties. Through each new experience, Kika and Melissa discover that sisterhood can be fun, challenging, and sometimes unpredictable, but always rewarding. Best of all, a sister is a friend for life.
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Sister's Choice
Emilie Richards
Childless Kendra and husband Isaac accept an offer from Kendra's younger sister- single mom Jamie- to conceive and carry a child for them. But when a medical crisis threatens Jamie's health she learns that the most difficult choice in her life is yet to come.
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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.
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Six of Crows
Leigh Bardugo
Ketterdam: a bustling hub of international trade where anything can be had for the right price-and no one knows that better than criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker. Kaz is offered a chance at a deadly heist that could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. But he can't pull it off alone... A convict with a thirst for revenge. A sharpshooter who can't walk away from a wager. A runaway with a privileged past. A spy known as the Wraith. A Heartrender using her magic to survive the slums. A thief with a gift for unlikely escapes. Six dangerous outcasts. One impossible heist. Kaz's crew is the only thing that might stand between the world and destruction-if they don't kill each other first.
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Skateboard Sonar
Eric Stevens
Although blind, Matty is an excellent skateboarder, but when the former champion mocks him during the skating competition, Matty shows that seeing is not everything.
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SkateFate
Juan Felipe Herrera
Lucky Z, a Chicano foster child, loved living on the edge until a drag racing accident left him in a wheelchair, but as he struggles to find his place in a new high school, he begins writing poetry everywhere about anything, and in finding his voice he also discovers the beauty around him.
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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.
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Skin Again
Bell Hooks
The skin I'm in is just a covering. It cannot tell my story. The skin I'm in is just a covering. If you want to know who I am you have got to come inside and open your heart way wide. Celebrating all that makes us unique and different, Skin Again offers new ways to talk about race and identity. Race matters, but only so much, what's most important is who we are on the inside.
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Sky
Pamela Paige Porter
Eleven-year-old Georgia lives with her grandparents, Paw Paw and Gramma, on the edge of the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. Spring comes, and it rains and rains until one afternoon the creek behind their house suddenly becomes a wall of water, washing away everything the family owns: their house, their barn, and even Daisy, the only stuffed animal Georgia has ever had. Through sheer determination, Georgia and her grandparents gradually rebuild their lives, but it's not until Georgia finds Sky, a foal that somehow survived the flood, that the family begins to heal and find meaning again despite their losses. Based on the true story of Georgia Salois and written in the haunting voice of a young child, Sky vividly describes the historic flood of 1964 and its effect on Georgia and her people. Their courage in overcoming disaster, poverty, and discrimination provides young readers with a compelling portrayal of endurance.
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Skyscraping
Cordelia Jensen
In 1993 in New York City, high school senior Mira uncovers many secrets, including that her father has a male lover.
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Slant
Laura E. Williams
Thirteen-year-old Lauren, a Korean-American adoptee, is tired of being called "slant" and "gook," and longs to have plastic surgery on her eyes, but when her father finds out about her wish--and a long-kept secret about her mother's death is revealed--Lauren starts to question some of her own assumptions.
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Sliding into Home
Nina Vincent
Thirteen-year-old Flip Simpson's ideal life just began to crumble. His adoptive parents are splitting up. He's moving from the only home he's ever known. He has to leave before his baseball team finishes the playoffs. And his little sister is his only companion. Flip folds under the weight of so much loss until he meets Ricki, an indigenous classmate who loves baseball and gives Flip a sense of pride in his Mayan roots, and Zorba, an eccentric houseboat dweller who is a cross between The Cat in the Hat and Willy Wonka. Zorba possesses an uncanny ability to sense Flip's fears and doubts and inspires the courage Flip needs to overcome both. Just as life begins to look up, Flip is faced with the challenge of a racist bully. Steve picks at the wounds Flip has tried so hard to mend and brings to the surface questions Flip didn't know he had about race, culture and belonging. Will Flip rise to the challenge and face Steve, or retreat into himself once again?
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Small Things
Mel Tregonning
In this wordless graphic picture book, a young boy feels alone with his worries. He isn't fitting in well at school. His grades are slipping. He's even lashing out at those who love him. This short but hard-hitting wordless graphic picture book gets to the heart of childhood anxiety and opens the way for dialogue about acceptance, vulnerability, and the universal experience of worry.
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Soames on the Range
Nancy Belgue
After he gets in trouble at school for fighting, fifteen-year-old San Francisco "Cisco" Soames is sent by his hippy parents to live with his renegade uncle on a dude ranch.
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Social Intercourse
Greg Howard
Told from both viewpoints, Beckett Gaines, an out-and-proud choir member, and star quarterback Jaxon Parker team up to derail the budding romance between their parents.
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Solace of the Road
Siobhan Dowd
While running away from a London foster home just before her fifteenth birthday, Holly has ample time to consider her years of residential care and her early life with her Irish mother, whom she is now trying to reach.
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Soledad O'Brien (Biogrpahies of Biracial Achievers)
David Robson
A brief biography of the television reporter, Soledad O'Brien.
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Some Assembly Required: The Not-So-Secret Life of a Transgender Teen
Arin Andrews
Seventeen-year-old Arin Andrews shares all the hilarious, painful, and poignant details of undergoing gender reassignment as a high school student in this winning teen memoir.
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Somebody's Daughter
Zara Phillips
A hard-hitting and witty memoir about an adopted woman's lifelong quest to find her birth parents - and her identity. It is the fascinating and revealing account of how a beautiful woman's life has been dominated by her adoption and how it has affected her and those around her.
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Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
Peter Cameron
Eighteen-year-old James living in New York City with his older sister and divorced mother struggles to find a direction for his life.
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Some Kids Just Can't Sit Still
Sam Goldstein
Rhyming text describes how difficult life can be for a child with Attention deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and how parents, teachers, and doctors can help.
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Some Kind of Happiness
Claire Legrand
Finley Hart is sent to her grandparents' house for the summer, but her overwhelmingly sad days continue until she escapes into her writings, which soon turn mysteriously real as she realises she must save this magical world in order to save herself.
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Someone Has Led This Child to Believe
Regina Louise
After years of jumping from one fleeting, often abusive home to the next, Louise meets a counselor named Jeanne Kerr. For the first time in her young life, Louise knows what it means to be seen, wanted, understood, and loved. After Kerr tries unsuccessfully to adopt Louise, the two are ripped apart—seemingly forever—and Louise continues her passage through the cold cinder-block landscape of a broken system, enduring solitary confinement, overmedication, and the actions of adults who seem hell-bent on convincing her that she deserves nothing, that she is nothing. But instead of losing her will to thrive, Louise remains determined to achieve her dream of a higher education. After she ages out of the system, Louise is thrown into adulthood and, haunted by her trauma, struggles to finish school, build a career, and develop relationships. As she puts it, it felt impossible “to understand how to be in the world.” Eventually, Louise learns how to confront her past and reflect on her traumas. She starts writing, quite literally, a new future for herself, a new way to be. Louise weaves together raw, sometimes fragmented memories, excerpts from real documents from her case file, and elegant reflections to tell the story of her painful upbringing and what came after. The result is a rich, engrossing account of one abandoned girl’s efforts to find her place in the world, people to love, and people to love her back.
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Someone Like Summer
M.E. Kerr
An upper-middle-class white girl from Long Island and an immigrant worker from Colombia fall in love despite objections from both their families and their community.
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Some People Have Two Dads
Luca Panzini and Fabri Kramer
This first book from the Some Families series is about Daisy, a happy little girl with two dads. We follow her through the story of her birthday and learn how fathers were helped by a surrogate to bring Daisy into their lives. An increasing number of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) couples are having children through surrogacy, co-parenting, donor, and adoption.