Author Archives: rachel @ typed truths

a tired aussie reader with a love of cats, libraries & sunflowers • she/her

Fable for the End of the World by Ava Reid

By encouraging massive accumulations of debt from its underclass, a single corporation, Caerus, controls all aspects of society. Inesa lives with her brother in a half-sunken town where they scrape by running a taxidermy shop. Unbeknownst to Inesa, their cruel and indolent mother has accrued an enormous debt—enough to qualify one of her children for Caerus’s livestreamed assassination spectacle: the Lamb’s Gauntlet. Melinoë is a Caerus assassin, trained to track and kill the sacrificial Lambs. The product of neural reconditioning and physiological alteration, she is a living weapon, known for her cold brutality and deadly beauty… Read more,

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Sexual harassment
  • Adult-minor relationship
  • Blood, gore & injury depiction
  • Emesis
  • Death of a child
  • Gun violence
  • Animal death

Don’t Tell Me How to Die by Marshall Karp

I had it all: a fantastic husband, two great kids, an exciting career. And then, at the age of forty-three, I found out I would be dead before my next birthday. My mother also died at forty-three. I was seventeen, and she warned me that women would flock to my suddenly single father like stray cats to an overturned milk truck. They did. And one absolutely evil woman practically destroyed his life, mine, and my sister’s. I am not letting that happen to my family. I have three months, and I plan to spend every waking minute searching for the perfect woman to take my place as Alex’s wife, and mother to Kevin and Katie… Read more,

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Alcohol consumption & drug use
  • Death of a parent
  • Murder mentioned

You Deserve to Know by Aggie Blum Thompson

Neighbors Gwen, Aimee, and Lisa share more than playdates and coffee mornings on their tranquil street in East Bethesda. They confide their deepest secrets, navigate the challenges of motherhood together, and provide a support system that seems unbreakable. Then Gwen’s husband is found murdered after one of their weekly Friday night dinners, and the peaceful quiet of their cul-de-sac shatters. The seemingly idyllic world of the three close-knit friends becomes a web of deception, betrayal, and revenge.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Infidelity
  • Death of a spouse
  • Blackmail

The Notorious Virtues by Alwyn Hamilton

At sixteen, Honora “Nora” Holtzfall is the daughter of the most powerful heiress in all of Walstad. Her family controls all the money–and all the magic–in the entire country. But despite being the center of attention, Nora has always felt like an outsider. When her mother is found dead in an alley, the family throne and fortune are suddenly up for grabs, and Nora will be pitted against her cousins in the Veritaz, the ultimate magical competition for power that determines the one family heir. But there’s a surprise contestant this… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Classism
  • Amnesia & memory loss
  • Death of a parent recounted
  • Murder

The Shots You Take by Rachel Reid

After moving back to his hometown ten years ago, Riley Tuck thought he had left his major league hockey career—and his broken heart—far behind. But when an unexpected tragedy strikes, it brings ex-teammate and former best friend with benefits Adam Sheppard back into his life. Coming to the small town of Avery River, Nova Scotia, might have been a mistake. Adam’s not sure he’ll ever win back Riley’s trust after the way they left things—and the attention he’s getting as a huge hockey star isn’t exactly helping. Yet the chemistry that crackles between them is undeniable… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Homophobia & internalised homophobia
  • Infidelity
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Anxiety & depression
  • Unplanned pregnancy mentioned (secondary character)
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a father recounted

Fan Service by Rosie Danan

The only place small-town outcast Alex Lawson fits in is the online fan forum she built for The Arcane Files, a long-running werewolf detective show. Her dedication to archiving fictional supernatural lore made her Internet-famous, even if she harbors a secret disdain for the show’s star, Devin Ashwood. (Never meet your heroes – sometimes they turn out to be The Worst.) Ever since his show went off the air, Devin and his career have spiralled, but waking up naked in the woods outside his LA home with no memory of the night before is a new low. It must have been a coincidence that the once-in-a-century Wolf Blood… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Parental abandonment & emotional child abuse mentioned
  • Anxiety
  • Endometriosis
  • Heart attack recounted (off-page)
  • Bullying recounted

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days. The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Imprisonment
  • Wildfire
  • Bullying

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty of life here, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, eighteen and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, seventeen, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; nine-year-old Orly, obsessed… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Adult-minor relationship
  • Infidelity
  • Death of a spouse from cancer
  • Drowning
  • Wildfire
  • Animal cruelty recounted

Nobody’s Fool by Harlan Coben

Sami Kierce, a young college grad backpacking in Spain with friends, wakes up one morning, covered in blood. There’s a knife in his hand. Beside him, the body of his girlfriend. Anna. Dead. He doesn’t know what happened. His screams drown out his thoughts—and then he runs. Twenty-two years later, Kierce, now a private investigator, is a new father who’s working off his debts by doing low level surveillance jobs and teaching wannabe sleuths at a night school in New York City. One evening, he recognizes a familiar face at the back of the classroom. Anna. It’s unmistakably her. As… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Human trafficking
  • Drug use (off-page)

Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley

It’s a Friday night in a campus bar in Berkeley, fall of 2000, and Percy Marks is pontificating about music again. Hall and Oates is on the jukebox, and Percy—who has no talent for music, just lots of opinions about it—can’t stop herself from overanalyzing the song, indulging what she knows to be her most annoying habit. But something is different tonight. The guy beside her at the bar, fellow student Joe Morrow, is a songwriter. And he could listen to Percy talk all night. Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs—and the results kick off a partnership that will… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Sexual assault