rachel @ typed truths

Muted by Tami Charles

Muted by Tami Charles

For seventeen-year-old Denver, music is everything. Writing, performing, and her ultimate goal: escaping her very small, very white hometown.

So Denver is more than ready on the day she and her best friends Dali and Shak sing their way into the orbit of the biggest R&B star in the world, Sean “Mercury” Ellis. Merc gives them everything: parties, perks, wild nights — plus hours and hours in the recording studio. Even the painful sacrifices and the lies the girls have to tell are all worth it.

Until they’re not.

Denver begins to realize that she’s trapped in Merc’s world, struggling to hold on to her own voice. As the dream turns into a nightmare, she must make a choice: lose her big break, or get broken.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Lesbomisia
Physical & psychological abuse
Rape of a minor & grooming behaviour
Forced dieting for weight loss
Kidnapping
Murder

He Must Like You by Danielle Younge-Ullman

He Must Like You by Danielle Younge-Ullman

Libby’s having a rough senior year. Her older brother absconded with his college money and is bartending on a Greek island. Her dad just told her she’s got to pay for college herself, and he’s evicting her when she graduates so he can Airbnb her room. A drunken hook-up with her coworker Kyle has left her upset and confused. So when Perry Ackerman, serial harasser and the most handsy customer at The Goat where she waitresses, pushes her over the edge, she can hardly be blamed for dumping a pitcher of sangria on his head.

Unfortunately, Perry is a local industry hero, the restaurant’s most important customer, and Libby’s mom’s boss. Now Libby has to navigate the fallout of her outburst, find an apartment, and deal with her increasing rage at the guys who’ve screwed up her life–and her increasing crush on the one guy who truly gets her. As timely as it is timeless, He Must Like You is a story about consent, rage, and revenge, and the potential we all have to be better people.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Racism
Victim-blaming
Rape and sexual assault
Workplace sexual harassment
Depression & PTSD
Cyberbullying

Everything Beautiful is Not Ruined by Danielle Younge-Ullman

Everything Beautiful is Not Ruined by Danielle Younge-Ullman

Then. Ingrid traveled all over Europe with her opera star mother, Margot-Sophia. Life was beautiful and bright, and every day soared with music.

Now. Ingrid is on a summertime wilderness survival trek for at-risk teens: addicts, runaways, and her. She’s fighting to survive crushing humiliations, physical challenges that push her to her limits, and mind games that threaten to break her.

Then. When the curtain fell on Margot-Sophia’s singing career, they buried the past and settled into a small, painfully normal life. But Ingrid longed to let the music soar again. She wanted it so much that, for a while, nothing else mattered.

Now. Ingrid is never going to make it through this summer if she can’t figure out why she’s here . . . and why the music really stopped.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Homomisia
Sexual assault
Depression
Suicide
Bullying

Midnight Radio by Iolanda Zandardino

Midnight Radio by Iolanda Zandardino

An intriguingly interwoven tale of four lives changed by a mysterious late-night radio broadcast that wakes them up from their mundane existences. Each tale speaks to different social issues without pandering to a political agenda: LGBT+ rights, racism, social network addiction, and the difficult decision between settling down versus following your dreams. Each tale is told in a vivid, polychromatic illustration style that flows from one character to another and back again in a uniquely identifiable fashion.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Homomisia & transmisia
Parental abuse
Mass shooting mentioned
Gun violence

Hands Down by Mariana Zapata

Hands Down by Mariana Zapata

Before he was Big Texas, he was Zac the Snack Pack. Bianca Brannen knows time–mostly–heals all wounds. Including those your once loved ones might have unintentionally given you. (Those just take longer.) She thinks she’s ready when a call has her walking back into her old friend’s life. Or at least as prepared as possible to see the starting quarterback in the National Football Organization. Before the lights, the fans, and the millions, he’d been a skinny kid with a heart of gold. Waltzing out of Zac Travis’s life should be easy. Just as easy as he walked out of hers.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

Workplace harassment
Infidelity mentioned

Sea Prayer by Khaled Hosseini

Sea Prayer by Khaled Hosseini

A short, powerful, illustrated book written by Khaled Hosseini in response to the current refugee crisis, Sea Prayer is composed in the form of a letter, from a father to his son, on the eve of their journey. Watching over his sleeping son, the father reflects on the dangerous sea-crossing that lies before them. It is also a vivid portrait of their life in Homs, Syria, before the war, and of that city’s swift transformation from a home into a deadly war zone.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Islamophobia
Blood depiction
Grief & loss depiction
Death of a child
Explosions and bombings
Shipwreck
Drowning
War themes

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

A Thousand Splendid Suns is a breathtaking story set against the volatile events of Afghanistan’s last thirty years – from the Soviet invasion to the reign of the Taliban to post-Taliban rebuilding – that puts the violence, fear, hope, and faith of this country in intimate, human terms. It is a tale of two generations of characters brought jarringly together by the tragic sweep of war, where personal lives – the struggle to survive, raise a family, find happiness – are inextricable from the history playing out around them.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Sexism
Arranged child marriage
Child and domestic abuse
Rape and sexual abuse
Suicide
Miscarriage & abortion
Mutilation
Cancer
War themes

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacrifices, their lies.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Graphic rape of a child and child sexual abuse
Child sex trafficking & sexual slavery mentioned
Suicide by gun & knife, on-page
Public executions by stoning
Hanging mentioned
Gun violence

Witches of Ash and Ruin by E. Latimer

Witches of Ash & Ruin by E. Latimer

Seventeen-year-old Dayna Walsh is struggling to cope with her somatic OCD; the aftermath of being outed as bisexual in her conservative Irish town; and the return of her long-absent mother, who barely seems like a parent. But all that really matters to her is ascending and finally, finally becoming a full witch-plans that are complicated when another coven, rumored to have a sordid history with black magic, arrives in town with premonitions of death. Dayna immediately finds herself at odds with the bewitchingly frustrating Meiner King, the granddaughter of their coven leader.

And then a witch turns up murdered at a local sacred site, along with the blood symbol of the Butcher of Manchester-an infamous serial killer whose trail has long gone cold. The killer’s motives are enmeshed in a complex web of witches and gods, and Dayna and Meiner soon find themselves at the center of it all. If they don’t stop the Butcher, one of them will be next.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Homomisia & forced outing recounted (off-page)
Conversion therapy mentioned
Physical & emotional abuse mentioned
Rape mentioned
Self-harm
OCD
Panic attacks

Remina by Junji Ito

Remina by Junji Ito

Also known as Hellstar Remina.

An unknown planet emerges from inside a wormhole, and its discoverer, Dr. Oguro, christens the celestial body “Remina” after his own daughter. His finding is met with great fanfare, and Remina herself rises to fame. However, the planet picks up speed as it moves along in its curious orbit, eliminating planets and stars one after another until finally Earth itself faces extinction…

Is the girl Remina the true cause of the catastrophe? A masterwork of horror from Junji Ito, unfolding on a universal scale.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Sexual assault
Blood & gore depiction, and body horror