Category Archives: Entries

While I Was Away by Waka Brown

While I Was Away by Waka T. Brown

When twelve-year-old Waka’s parents suspect she can’t understand basic Japanese, they make the drastic decision to send her to Tokyo to live for several months with her strict grandmother. Forced to say goodbye to her friends and what would have been her summer vacation, Waka is plucked from her straight-A-student life in rural Kansas and flown across the globe, where she faces the culture shock of a lifetime. In Japan, Waka struggles with reading and writing in kanji, doesn’t quite mesh with her complicated and distant Obaasama, and gets made fun of by the students in her… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Child abuse
  • Cancer mentioned
  • Bullying

The Strange Thing We Become and Other Dark Tales by Eric LaRocca

The Strange Thing We Become and Other Dark Tales by Eric LaRocca

Eight stories of literary dark fiction from a master storyteller. Exploring the shadow side of love, these are tales of grief, obsession, control. Intricate examinations of trauma and tragedy in raw, poetic prose. In these narratives, a woman imagines horrific scenarios whilst caring for her infant niece; on-line posts chronicle a cancer diagnosis; a couple in the park with their small child encounter a stranger with horrific consequences; a toxic relationship reaches a terrifying resolution…

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Abusive relationship
  • Elder abuse
  • Incest
  • Cheating
  • Miscarriage
  • Cancer & terminal illness
  • Death of a parent
  • Death of a spouse
  • Murder
  • Kidnapping
  • Torture

The Rearranged Life of Oona Lockhart by Margarita Montimore

The Rearranged Life of Oona Lockhart by Margarita Montimore

Brooklyn, 1982. Oona Lockhart is about to celebrate her 19th birthday and ring in the New Year. But at the stroke of midnight, she is torn from her friends and boyfriend, finding herself in her fifty-one-year-old body, thirty-two years into the future. Greeted by a friendly stranger, Oona learns that on every birthday she will enter a different year of her adult life at random. Still a young woman on the inside, but ever-changing on the outside, who will she be next year? Wealthy philanthropist? Nineties Club Kid? World traveller? Wife to a man she’s never met? While Oona gets glimpses… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Homomisia
  • Transmisia
  • Fatmisia
  • Slut-shaming
  • Cheating
  • Alcohol consumption & abuse
  • Drug abuse
  • Terminal illness

Near the Bone by Christina Henry

Near the Bone by Christina Henry

Mattie can’t remember a time before she and William lived alone on a mountain together. She must never make him upset. But when Mattie discovers the mutilated body of a fox in the woods, she realizes that they’re not alone after all. There’s something in the woods that wasn’t there before, something that makes strange cries in the night, something with sharp teeth and claws. When three strangers appear on the mountaintop looking for the creature in the woods, Mattie knows their presence will anger William. Terrible things happen when William is angry.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Misogyny
  • Graphic domestic violence including physical beatings, deprivation of food, water and shelter, and denial of autonomy (theme)
  • Martial rape, off-page
  • Miscarriage & stillbirth recounted
  • Chronic arm injury
  • Emesis, on-page
  • Blood & gore depiction including the hanging of dead bodies
  • Death of a friend
  • Murder
  • Strangulation, on-page
  • Kidnapping & captivity
  • Animal death and dead bodies (fox, bear)

The Never King by Nikki St Crowe

The Never King by Nikki St. Crowe

The stories were all wrong — Hook was never the villain. For two centuries, all of the Darling women have disappeared on their 18th birthday. Sometimes they’re gone for only a day, some a week or a month. But they always return broken. Now, on the afternoon of my 18th birthday, my mother is running around the house making sure all the windows are barred and the doors locked. But it’s pointless. Because when night falls, he comes for me. And this time, the Never King and the Lost Boys aren’t willing to let me go.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Murder
  • Kidnapping

The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett by Chelsea Sedoti

The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett by Chelsea Sedoti

Hawthorn wasn’t trying to insert herself into a missing person’s investigation. Or maybe she was. But that’s only because Lizzie Lovett’s disappearance is the one fascinating mystery their sleepy town has ever had. Bad things don’t happen to popular girls like Lizzie Lovett, and Hawthorn is convinced she’ll turn up at any moment-which means the time for speculation is now. So Hawthorn comes up with her own theory for Lizzie’s disappearance. A theory way too absurd to take seriously, at first. Th more Hawthorn… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Adult-minor relationship*
  • Suicide

*Context : Relationship between a seventeen-year-old girl and a twenty-five-year-old man.

The Sky Weaver by Kristen Ciccarelli

The Sky Weaver by Kristen Ciccarelli

At the end of one world, there always lies another. Safire, a soldier, knows her role in this world is to serve the King of Firgaard—helping to maintain the peace in her oft-troubled nation. Eris, a deadly pirate, has no such conviction. Known as the Death Dancer for her ability to evade even the most determined of pursuers, she possesses a superhuman power to move between worlds. When one can roam from dimension to dimension, can one ever be home? Can love and loyalty truly exist? Now Safire and Eris-sworn… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Loss of limb & maiming
  • Murder

The Hideaway Inn by Philip William Stover

The Hideaway Inn by Philip William Stover

No one in the charming river town of New Hope, Pennsylvania, needs to know that Vince Amato plans on flipping The Hideaway Inn to the highest bidder and returning to his luxury lifestyle in New York City. He needs to make his last remaining investment turn a profit…even if that means temporarily relocating to the quirky small town where he endured growing up. He’s spent years reinventing himself and won’t let his past dictate his future. But on his way to New Hope, Vince gets stuck in the middle of nowhere and his past might be the only thing that can get… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Transmisia
  • Homomisia
  • Bullying

Entangled by JS Scott

Entangled by J.S. Scott

Aiden Sinclair was a commercial fisherman before he suddenly came into his billionaire inheritance—not that he’s complaining. Being a Sinclair does have its perks. But things were simpler before the money. He may have been dirt poor, but he loved his job and fully intended to always come back from the sea to his girlfriend, Skye Weston, so they could move toward something more permanent. Or at least. that had been the plan . . . until he returned from a two-month fishing trip to discover that she had moved away and was marry… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Martial rape
  • Child sexual assault

The Sullivan Sisters by Kathryn Ormsbee

The Sullivan Sisters by Kathryn Ormsbee

That painful fact of life couldn’t be truer for the Sullivan sisters. Once, they used to be close, sharing secrets inside homemade blanket castles. Now, life in the Sullivan house means closed doors and secrets left untold. Fourteen-year-old Murphy, an aspiring magician, is shocked by the death of Siegfried, her pet turtle. Seventeen-year-old Claire is bound for better things than her Oregonian hometown—until she receives a crushing rejection from her dream college. And eighteen-year-old Eileen is nursing a growing addiction in the wake of life-altering news… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Child abuse recounted
  • Alcoholism
  • Alcohol consumption & abuse
  • Terminal cancer (leukemia)
  • Emesis
  • Death of a parent
  • Murder
  • Animal death & neglect