Families are Different

Pellegrini, N. (1991). Families are different. New York, NY: Scholastic Inc.

The book Families are Different is about two girls that were adopted from Korea when they were babies. The main character of the story is Nicola, who is the younger sister. Nicola introduces her family, talking about her sister, her dog, and activities she does. She explains the adoption process and then begins to talk about how sometimes she gets sad and mad because she does not look like her parents. Her mom tells her that there are many kinds of families and it doesn't matter what they look like because love holds them together. Then Nicola goes through and talks about many different types of families that there are. At the end she says that she is not strange at all and that her family has a lot of love.

I think that this book would be a great book to use as a diverse piece of literature because it shows diversity of families. There are about ten families that Nicola talks about, and even though they do not show all the combinations there still are many types included. Nicola talks about each family and how they are not wrong just different. This is key because she is not judging, just pointing out the facts as they are, which is sometimes what diverse literature needs to include. Besides diverse families they also show diverse people, there are people of different races and genders, and the book does not choose one over the other, it puts them all in equal light which is great! I really enjoyed reading this book!