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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The Scorpion Rules
Erin Bow
The teenage princess of a future-world Canadian superpower, where royal children are held hostage to keep their countries from waging war, falls in love with an American prince who rebels against the brutal rules governing their existences.
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The Secret Ingredient
Stewart Lewis
After a chance meeting with a psychic, Olivia, a teen cook living in Los Angeles with her two dads and misfit brother, finds a vintage cookbook with handwritten notes inside and pieces together a story that turns a normal summer into a search for her birth mother.
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The Secret Life of Prince Charming
Deb Caletti
Seventeen-year-old Quinn has heard all her life about how untrustworthy men are, so when she discovers that her charismatic but selfish father, with whom she has recently begun to have a tentative relationship, has stolen from the many women in his life, she decides she must avenge this wrong.
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The Secret's Out (Amy Hodgepodge, #5)
Kim Wayans Wayans and Kevin Knotts
Can a secret break up the friendship of five fourth-grade girls and prevent them from finishing an art project?
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These Dreams of You
Steve Erickson
The election of the country's first black president prompts failed novelist Zan Nordhoc and his wife to solve the mystery surrounding their adopted black daughter's life, an epic journey that helps a struggling family salvage its bonds.
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The Seeds of Friendship
Michael Foreman
A powerful fable about friendship transforming the world from the award-winning and internationally best-selling illustrator Michael Foreman.
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These Hands
Margaret H. Mason
An African American man tells his grandson about a time when, despite all the wonderful things his hands could do, they could not touch bread at the Wonder Bread factory. Based on stories of bakery union workers; includes historical note.
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The Serpent's Shadow
Rick Riordan
Despite their best efforts, Carter and Sadie Kane can't seem to keep Apophis, the chaos snake, down. Now Apophis is threatening to plunge the world into eternal darkness, and the Kanes are faced with the impossible task of having to destroy him once and for all. Unfortunately, the magicians of the House of Life are on the brink of civil war, the gods are divided, and the young initiates of Brooklyn House stand almost alone against the forces of chaos. The Kanes' only hope is an ancient spell that might turn the serpent's own shadow into a weapon, but the magic has been lost for a millennia. To find the answer they need, the Kanes must rely on the murderous ghost of a powerful magician who might be able to lead them to the serpent's shadow...or might lead them to their deaths in the depths of the underworld.
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The Ship Beyond Time (The Girl from Everywhere, #2)
Heidi Heilig
Nix has spent her whole life journeying to places both real and imagined aboard her time-traveling father's ship. And now it's finally time for her to take the helm. Her father has given up his obsession to save her mother -- and possibly erase Nix's existence -- and Nix's future lies bright before her. Until she learns that she is destined to lose the one she loves. But her relationship with Kash -- best friend, thief, charmer extraordinaire -- is only just beginning. How can she bear to lose him? How can she bear to become as adrift and alone as her father? Desperate to change her fate, Nix takes her crew to a mythical utopia to meet another Navigator who promises to teach her how to manipulate time. But everything in this utopia is constantly changing, and nothing is what it seems -- not even her relationship with Kash. Nix must grapple with whether anyone can escape her destiny, her history, her choices.
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The Ship of the Dead
Rick Riordan
Magnus and his friends set sail for the farthest borders of Jotunheim and Niflheim in pursuit of Asgard's greatest threat, Loki's demonic ship full of zombies.
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The Side Door
Jan Donley
When Mel becomes obsessed with Alex Weber's death, she finds trouble with her peers and confronts a world of adult secrecy and deception.
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The Sissy Duckling
Harvey Fierstein
Elmer the duck is teased because he is different, but he proves himself by not only surviving the winter, but also saving his Papa.
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The Skin I'm In
Sharon Flake
Thirteen-year-old Maleeka, uncomfortable because her skin is extremely dark, meets a new teacher with a birthmark on her face and makes some discoveries about how to love who she is and what she looks like.
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The Skin I'm In: A First Look at Racism
Pat Thomas
A simple explanation of racism, its basic causes, and the ways in which it can lead to unfair practices.
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The Skin You Live In
Michael Tyler
Rhyming text and illustrations celebrate being content with the skin in which one lives, whatever that skin might be.
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The Someday Birds
Sally J. Pla
Charlie, twelve, who has autism and obsessive compulsive disorder, must endure a cross-country trip with his siblings and a strange babysitter to visit their father, who will undergo brain surgery.
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The Song of Achilles
Madeline Miller
Patroclus, an awkward young prince, follows Achilles into war, little knowing that the years that follow will test everything they have learned, everything they hold dear. And that, before he is ready, he will be forced to surrender his friend to the hands of Fate. Set during the Trojan War.
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The Son of Neptune (The Heroes of Olympus, #2)
Rick Riordan
Demigod Percy Jackson, still with no memory, and his new friends from Camp Jupiter, Hazel and Frank, go on a quest to free Death, but their bigger task is to unite the Greek and Roman camps so that the Prophecy of Seven can be fulfilled.
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The Sorta Sisters
Adrian Fogelin
In Florida, Anna Casey lives with what she hopes is the last in a long line of foster mothers, and Mica Delano lives with her father on their small boat, and when the two of them begin corresponding, they discover they have a lot in common.
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The Sound of All Things
Myron Uhlberg
A hearing boy and his deaf parents from Brooklyn enjoy the rides, food, and sights of 1930's Coney Island where the father longs to know about how everything sounds and his son tries to interpret the noisy surroundings through sign language and a wealth of new words learned from a trip to the library.
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The Spider King's Daughter
Chibundu Onuzo
Seventeen-year-old Abike Johnson is the favourite child of her wealthy father. She lives in a sprawling mansion in Lagos, protected by armed guards. A world away from Abike's mansion, in the city's slums, lives a hawker trying to support his family by selling ice cream from the side of the road.
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The Star: A Story to Help Young Children Understand Foster Care
Cynthia Miller Lovell
The Star: A Story to Help Young Children Understand Foster Care is an easy-to-read, short story with beautiful, watercolor illustrations. The book follows a fictional young girl, Kit, who is taken from her mother to the safety, and different world, of a foster home. On Kit's first night in foster care, she becomes friends with a star outside her bedroom window. The star tells Kit about other foster children it has seen. Through the story, the star is a source of comfort for Kit as she experiences many emotions and adjusts to all the new things in her foster home.
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The Stars at Oktober Bend
Glenda Millard
Alice is fifteen, with hair as red as fire and skin as pale as bone. Something inside Alice is broken: she remembers words but struggles to speak them. Still, Alice knows words are for sharing, so she pins them to posters in tucked-away places: railway waiting rooms, fish-and-chip shops, quiet corners. Manny is sixteen, with a scar from shoulder to elbow. Something inside Manny is broken: he was once a child soldier, forced to do terrible, violent things. But in a new land with new people who will care for him, he spends time exploring on foot. And in his pocket, he carries a poem he scooped up. And he knows the words by heart. When Manny and Alice meet, their relationship brings the beginning of love and healing.
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The Storm
Marc Harshman
Though confined to a wheelchair, Johnathan faces the terror of a tornado all by himself and saves the lives of the horses on the family farm. Full-color illustrations.
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The Storm Runner
Jennifer Cervantes
To prevent the Mayan gods from battling each other and destroying the world, thirteen-year-old Zane must unravel an ancient prophecy, stop an evil god, and discover how the physical disability that makes him reliant on a cane also connects him to his father and his ancestry.