Category Archives: Entries

Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Montserrat has always been overlooked. She’s a talented sound editor, but she’s left out of the boys’ club running the film industry in ’90s Mexico City. And she’s all but invisible to her best friend, Tristán, a charming if faded soap opera star, though she’s been in love with him since childhood.
Then Tristán discovers his new neighbor is the cult horror director Abel Urueta, and the legendary auteur claims he can change their lives—even if his tale of a Nazi occultist imbuing magic into highly volatile silver nitrate stock sounds like sheer fantasy. The magic film was never finished, which is why, Urueta swears, his career vanished overnight. He is cursed…. Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Misogyny
  • Poverty themes
  • Racism, specifically Nazis, mentioned
  • Prejudice against Indigenous peoples mentioned
  • Attempted suicide mentioned
  • Suicidal ideations
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Substance abuse
  • Blood depiction
  • Cancer discussed
  • Grief depiction
  • Fire
  • Murder

Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas

As the daughter of a rancher in 1840s Mexico, Nena knows a thing or two about monsters—her home has long been threatened by tensions with Anglo settlers from the north. But something more sinister lurks near the ranch at night, something that drains men of their blood and leaves them for dead.
Something that once attacked Nena nine years ago.
Believing Nena dead, Néstor has been on the run from his grief ever since. But no amount of drink can dispel the night terrors of sharp teeth… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Classism
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Gun violence
  • War themes
  • Animal attack (fantastical)
  • Animal death

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. At the core of this rich, expansive, layered novel, Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years.
At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the envy of their friends… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Sexual assault
  • Sex work
  • Family estrangement
  • Agoraphobia
  • Depression
  • Eating disorder
  • Suicide
  • Drug use & overdose
  • Cancer

Matrix by Lauren Groff

Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, 17-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease.
At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Religious persecution
  • Sexual assault
  • Emotional abuse
  • Childbirth
  • Miscarriage
  • Decapitation
  • Physical assault

The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw

You may think you know how the fairytale goes: a mermaid comes to shore and weds the prince. But what the fables forget is that mermaids have teeth. And now, her daughters have devoured the kingdom and burned it to ashes.
On the run, the mermaid is joined by a mysterious plague doctor with a darkness of their own. Deep in the eerie, snow-crusted forest, the pair stumble upon a village of ageless children who thirst for blood, and the three ‘saints’ who control them… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Miscarriage
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Body horror
  • Cannibalism
  • Dismemberment
  • Death of a child
  • Murder
  • Torture
  • Animal death

Troubles in Paradise by Elin Hilderbrand

After uprooting her life in the States, Irene Steele has just settled in at the villa on St. John where her husband Russ had been living a double life. But a visit from the FBI shakes her foundations, and Irene once again learns just how little she knew about the man she loved. With help from their friends, Irene and her sons set up their lives while evidence mounts that the helicopter crash that killed Russ may not have been an accident. Meanwhile, the island watches this drama unfold — including the driver of a Jeep with tinted windows who seems to be shadowing the Steele family… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Infidelity
  • Unplanned pregnancy
  • Death of a spouse mentioned
  • Helicopter accident

The Ballad of Never After by Stephanie Garber

After Jacks, the Prince of Hearts, betrays her, Evangeline Fox swears she’ll never trust him again. Now that she’s discovered her own magic, Evangeline believes she can use it to restore the chance at happily ever after that Jacks stole away.

But when a new terrifying curse is revealed, Evangeline finds herself entering into a tenuous partnership with the Prince of Hearts again. Only this time, the rules have changed. Jacks isn’t the only force Evangeline needs to be wary of… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Alcohol consumption (on-page, protagonist)
  • Blood, gore & injury depiction, including mentions of decapitation, blood-drinking and death from a vampire bite
  • Murder by stabbing during a knife fight
  • Near-strangulation
  • Loss of autonomy (magical curse)

Once Upon a Broken Heart by Stephanie Garber

Evangeline Fox was raised in her beloved father’s curiosity shop, where she grew up on legends about immortals, like the tragic Prince of Hearts. She knows his powers are mythic, his kiss is worth dying for, and that bargains with him rarely end well.

But when Evangeline learns that the love of her life is about to marry another, she becomes desperate enough to offer the Prince of Hearts whatever he wants in exchange for his help to stop the wedding. The prince only asks for three kisses… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Blood depiction & mentions of blood-drinking
  • Death of a parents mentioned (off-page)
  • Murder
  • Blackmail
  • Forced starvation (magical, vampires caged without blood)
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Animal attack (wolf)

The Stolen Heir by Holly Black

Eight years have passed since the Battle of the Serpent. But in the icy north, Lady Nore of the Court of Teeth has reclaimed the Ice Needle Citadel. There, she is using an ancient relic to create monsters of stick and snow who will do her bidding and exact her revenge.

Suren, child queen of the Court of Teeth, and the one person with power over her mother, fled to the human world. There, she lives feral in the woods. Lonely, and still haunted by the merciless torments she endured in the Court of Teeth, she bides her time by releasing mortals from foolish bargains… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Child abuse recounted
  • Suicide mentioned
  • Drugging
  • Death during childbirth
  • Emesis
  • Blood & Gore depiction
  • Captivity
  • Kidnapping
  • Murder
  • Torture

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

Growing up in a housing estate in Glasgow, Mungo and James are born under different stars–Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic–and they should be sworn enemies if they’re to be seen as men at all. Yet against all odds, they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds.

As they fall in love, they dream of finding somewhere they belong, while Mungo works hard to hide his true self… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Ableism
  • Homomisia
  • Racism
  • Violent hate crimes
  • Child sexual abuse, including grooming & paedophilia
  • Domestic abuse, including emotional & physical
  • Self-harm
  • Alcohol use
  • Drug use
  • Abortion
  • Murder
  • Animal death