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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Under the Wolf, Under the Dog
Adam Rapp
Sixteen-year-old Steve struggles to make sense of his mother's terminal breast cancer and his brother's suicide.
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Uniquely Wired
Julia Cook
Zak knows he's not quite like his siblings and classmates. Bright lights and big crowds send him into freak-out mode. Hugs make him uncomfortable, too. His atypical behaviors, from flapping his arms to spinning his body, seem so out of place. But for Zak, that's just how he copes. Despite some peculiar behaviors, Zak's desires and disappointments are as ordinary as any child's. He loves watches; he hates being excluded. As Zak embraces life the only way he knows how, he teaches those around him important lessons about fairness, patience, curiosity, and independence.
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Unleashed
Sigmund Brouwer
Jace has taken up boxing on the wrong side of the tracks as he prepares to seek vengeance on his abusive father with two other teen vigilantes.
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Unplugged: Ella Gets Her Family Back
Laura Pedersen
Upset that her family is so focused on the screens on their various electronic devices that they no longer talk, laugh, and play games together, Ella takes all of their chargers and small devices.
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Unreachable
Katie Leone
Janice Rosenthal is entering her eighth year of teaching, but it might be her last. Never before has she had a student as unruly and insubordinate as this one. Andrew Bryant is the terror of seventh grade, a student known for driving teachers to the edge of retirement, and he is in her class. How can Janice--and the rest of her students--make it through the school year with such a disruptive force in the classroom? Her only hope is to try to break through the orphan's defenses, to pierce a wall that no other teacher has ever scratched. When she discovers Andrew's secret, two lives will be changed forever.
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Unspoken (The Lynburn Legacy #1)
Sarah Rees Brennan
Kami Glass is in love with someone she's never met--a boy she's talked to in her head since she was born. This has made her an outsider in the sleepy English town of Sorry-in-the-Vale, but she has learned ways to turn that to her advantage. Her life seems to be in order, until disturbing events begin to occur. There has been screaming in the woods and the manor overlooking the town has lit up for the first time in 10 years. The Lynburn family, who ruled the town a generation ago and who all left without warning, have returned. Now Kami can see that the town she has known and loved all her life is hiding a multitude of secrets--and a murderer. The key to it all just might be the boy in her head. The boy she thought was imaginary is real, and definitely and deliciously dangerous.
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Untwine: A Novel
Edwidge Danticat
Identical twin teenagers Giselle and Isabelle Boyer have always been inseparable, and expected to stay that way even though their Haitian American parents are separating--but when when the entire family is caught in a car crash, everyone's world is shattered forever.
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Up From the Sea
Leza Lowitz
A novel in verse about the March 2011 tsunami that sent Japan into chaos, told from the point-of-view of Kai, a biracial teenaged boy. The March 2011 tsunami devastated Kai's coastal Japanese village, and he lost nearly everyone and everything he cares about. When he's offered a trip to New York to meet kids whose lives were changed by 9/11, Kai realizes he also has a chance to look for his estranged American father. Visiting Ground Zero on its tenth anniversary, Kai discovers that the only way to make something good come out of the disaster back home is to return there and help rebuild his town.
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Uprooted: The Japanese American Experience During World War II
Albert Marrin
Just seventy-five years ago, the American government did something that most would consider unthinkable today: it rounded up over 100,000 of its own citizens based on nothing more than their ancestry and, suspicious of their loyalty, kept them in concentration camps for the better part of four years. How could this have happened? Uprooted takes a close look at the history of racism in America and carefully follows the treacherous path that led one of our nation’s most beloved presidents to make this decision. Meanwhile, it also illuminates the history of Japan and its own struggles with racism and xenophobia, which led to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, ultimately tying the two countries together. Today, America is still filled with racial tension, and personal liberty in wartime is as relevant a topic as ever. Moving and impactful, National Book Award finalist Albert Marrin’s sobering exploration of this monumental injustice shines as bright a light on current events as it does on the past.
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Valentine to a Flying Mouse
Laura Hawkins
During preparations for the fourth grade Valentine party, Tammy meets the wheelchair-bound owner of the local bookstore who helps her learn to cope with her parents' separation and to believe in herself.
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Vanishing Colors
Constance Orbeck Nilssen
As a young girl and her mother take shelter for the night in their war-torn city, the whole world appears muted and dark. When the girl wakes in the middle of the night to find a bird watching her, she knows it’s the one from her mother’s stories, who flies down from the mountains to protect people from harm. She tells the bird what her what her life used to be like, before the war and destruction—she describes her favorite dress, the open market stalls, her dad playing music on the roof. As she continues to remember, colors slowly seep back into her life, and with them comes the courage to hope for a new beginning.
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Vengeance Road
Erin Bowman
When Kate Thompson’s father is killed by the notorious Rose Riders for a mysterious journal that reveals the secret location of a gold mine, the eighteen-year-old disguises herself as a boy and takes to the gritty plains looking for answers and justice. What she finds are devious strangers, dust storms, and a pair of brothers who refuse to quit riding in her shadow. But as Kate gets closer to the secrets about her family, she gets closer to the truth about herself and must decide if there's room for love in a heart so full of hate.
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Vintage: A Ghost Story
Steve Berman
A lonely seventeen-year-old who has dreamed of meeting a different and special boy desperately seeks help from his friend Trace, a Goth girl, to free him from the clutches of a handsome ghost he has met on a rural New Jersey highway.
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Violet
Tania Duprey Stehlik
Violet's mother is red, and her father is blue--so why isn't she red or blue? Why is she purple? Upset and confused, Violet goes to her mother. Using paints, her mother shows her that when you combine red and blue, you get violet!
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Visiting Day
Jacqueline Woodson and James E. Ransome
A young girl and her grandmother visit the girl's father in prison.
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Wait and See
Tony Bradman
It's Saturday, and Jo has some pocket money to spend. So Jo and her mum go shopping, while Dad stays at home to make lunch for them all. But what should she spend her money on? She'll have to wait and see.
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Waiting for Baby
Rachel Fuller
A young child learns what to expect when his new sibling is born and comes into his life. On board pages.
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Waiting for May
Janet Morgan Stoeke
A young boy looks forward to the day when a new sister, who will be adopted from China, joins his family.
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Waiting for Normal
Leslie Connor
Twelve-year-old Addie tries to cope with her mother's erratic behavior and being separated from her beloved stepfather and half-sisters when she and her mother go to live in a small trailer by the railroad tracks on the outskirts of Schenectady, New York.
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Waiting for You
Susane Colasanti
It's sophomore year, and Marisa is ready for a fresh start and, hopefully, her first real boyfriend. But after popular Derek asks her out, things get complicated. Not only do her parents unexpectedly separate, but Marisa has a fight with her best friend, and Derek, the love of her life, delivers a shocking disappointment. The only things keeping Marisa together are the podcasts from the anonymous DJ, who seems to totally understand Marisa. But she doesn't know who he is ... or maybe she does.
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Walking Eagle: The Little Comanche Boy
Ana Eulate and Jon Brokenbrow
A Comanche boy named Walking Eagle tells tales without words, using his hands, his face, his smile, and his eyes to communicate with animals and the people of other tribes that he meets on his journey.
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Walk Two Moons
Sharon Creech
After her mother leaves home suddenly, thirteen-year-old Sal and her grandparents take a car trip retracing her mother's route. Along the way, Sal recounts the story of her friend Phoebe, whose mother also left.
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Walk with Me
Jairo Buitrago
A little girl imagines a lion taking the place of her father who no longer lives with her family, an animal that keeps her safe on her travels from school to home.
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Wandering Son, Vol. 1 (Wandering Son #1)
Takako Shimura
The fifth grade. The threshold to puberty, and the beginning of the end of childhood innocence. Shuichi Nitori and his new friend Yoshino Takatsuki have happy homes, loving families, and are well-liked by their classmates. But they share a secret that further complicates a time of life that is awkward for anyone : Shuichi is a boy who wants to be a girl, and Yoshino is a girl who wants to be a boy.
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Wandering Son, Vol. 2 (Wandering Son #2)
Takako Shimura
In the second volume of Shimura Takako's superb coming-of-age story, our transgendered protagonists, Shuichi and Yoshino, have entered the sixth grade. Shuichi spends a precious gift of cash from his grandmother on a special present for himself, a purchase that triggers a chain of events in which his sister Maho learns his secret, and Shuichi inadvertently steals the heart of a boy Maho in interested in.