Category Archives: Contemporary

The Impossible Vastness of Us by Samantha Young

India Maxwell hasn’t just moved across the country—she’s plummeted to the bottom rung of the social ladder. It’s taken years to cover the mess of her home life with a veneer of popularity. Now she’s living in one of Boston’s wealthiest neighbourhoods with her mom’s fiancé and his daughter, Eloise. Thanks to her soon-to-be stepsister’s clique of friends, including Eloise’s gorgeous, arrogant boyfriend Finn, India feels like the one thing she hoped never to be seen as again: trash. But India’s not alone in struggling to control the secrets of her past. Eloise and Finn, the school’s… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Homophobia
  • Bullying
  • Poverty

A Cosmic Kind of Love by Samantha Young

When event planner Hallie Goodman receives party-inspiration material from the bride of her latest wedding project, the last thing she expects to find in the files are digital videos from Darcy’s ex-boyfriend. Hallie knows it’s wrong to keep watching these personal videos, but this guy is cute, funny, and an astronaut on the International Space Station to boot. She’s only human. And it’s not long until she starts sending e-mails and video diaries to his discontinued NASA address. Since they’re bouncing back, there’s no way anyone will ever be able to see them… right? Christopher… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Fatmisia
  • Parental divorce
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Emesis

Beyond the Thistles by Samantha Young

It’s been a long time since Walker Ironside left behind Scotland and the memories that haunt him. Yet after years of traveling the world as a bodyguard, Walker misses his homeland enough to return. To a village in the Scottish Highlands that plays host to an exclusive members-only club, Ardnoch Estate. If not happy, Walker is content working with the elite security at the club and maintaining his bachelor lifestyle. What he doesn’t need is distraction in the form of the enticing but too-young newcomer, single mother Sloane Harrow. Sloane never imagined she’d get pregnant at sixteen. Or that a decade later she’d escape from… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Attempted rape
  • Domestic violence
  • Death from an overdose mentioned
  • Blood & injury depiction
  • Cancer mentioned
  • Murder
  • Gun violence

The Paradise Problem by Christina Lauren

Anna Green thought she was marrying Liam “West” Weston for access to subsidized family housing while at UCLA. She also thought she’d signed divorce papers when the graduation caps were tossed, and they both went on their merry ways. Three years later, Anna is a starving artist living paycheck to paycheck while West is a Stanford professor. He may be one of four heirs to the Weston Foods conglomerate, but he has little interest in working for the heartless corporation his family built from the ground up. He is interested, however, in his one-hundred-million… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • False allegations of sexual harassment (love interest)
  • Psychological & verbal parental abuse
  • Parent in cancer recovery

The Rom-Commers by Katherine Center

Emma Wheeler desperately longs to be a screenwriter. She’s spent her life studying, obsessing over, and writing romantic comedies―good ones! That win contests! But she’s also been the sole caretaker for her kind-hearted dad, who needs full-time care. Now, when she gets a chance to re-write a script for famous screenwriter Charlie Yates―The Charlie Yates! Her personal writing god!―it’s a break too big to pass up. Emma’s younger sister steps in for caretaking duties, and Emma moves to L.A. for six weeks for the writing gig of a lifetime. But what is it they say… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Parental abandonment recounted
  • Divorce mentioned
  • Parent with Meniere’s disease & hemiplegia from a traumatic brain injury
  • Death of a parent in a rock climbing accident recounted
  • Near drowning incident recounted
  • Car accident (on-page)

I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue

As far as Jolene is concerned, her interactions with her colleagues should start and end with her official duties as an admin for Supershops, Inc. Unfortunately, her irritating, incompetent coworkers don’t seem to understand the importance of boundaries. Her secret to survival? She vents her grievances in petty email postscripts, then changes the text colour to white so no one can see. That is, until one of her secret messages is exposed. Her punishment: sensitivity training (led by the suspiciously friendly HR guy, Cliff) and rigorous email restrictions. When an IT mix-up grants her access to her entire department’s private emails… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Emotional child abuse & gaslighting
  • Anxiety, depression & Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
  • Bullying & workplace harassment
  • Terminal cancer mentioned

Honey by Isabel Banta

It is 1997, and Amber Young has received a life-changing call. It is a chance thousands of girls would die for: the opportunity to join girl group Cloud9 in Los Angeles and escape her small town. She quickly finds herself in the orbits of fellow rising stars Gwen Morris, a driven singer-dancer, and Wes Kingston, a member of the biggest boy band in the world, ETA. As Amber embarks on her solo career and her fame intensifies, her rich interior life is frequently reduced. Surrounded by people who claim to love her but only wish to exploit her, and driven by a desire for recognition and success, for love and sex, for agency and connect… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Misogyny, body-shaming & homophobia
  • Alcoholism

Lies and Weddings by Kevin Kwan

Rufus Leung Gresham, future Earl of Greshambury and son of a former Hong Kong supermodel, has a problem: his family fortune, the legendary Gresham Trust, has been depleted by decades of profligate spending. While magazine covers and Instagram stories display impeccably designed manors and shiny new yachts, the secret reality holds nothing more than a gargantuan mountain of debt. The only solution, put forth by Rufus’s scheming mother, is for Rufus to seduce a woman with money, thereby securing the family’s precarious financial future. Should he marry Solene… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism & sexism
  • Eating disorders mentioned

Paper Towns by John Green

Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs into his life—dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge—he follows. After their all-nighter ends, and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues—and they’re for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees the girl he thought he knew…

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Depiction of the dead body of a suicide victim
  • Alcohol consumption & smoking

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

When it comes to relationships, Colin Singleton’s type happens to be girls named Katherine. And when it comes to girls named Katherine, Colin is always getting dumped. Nineteen times, to be exact. On a road trip miles from home, this anagram-happy, washed-up child prodigy has ten thousand dollars in his pocket, a bloodthirsty feral hog on his trail, and an overweight, Judge Judy-loving best friend riding shotgun–but no Katherines. Colin is on a mission to prove The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, which he hopes will predict the future of any relation… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Alcohol consumption
  • Physical assault (fistfight)