Category Archives: Kidlit

This tag contains all books tagged as Children’s Literature, including picture books, Middle Grade fiction, Young Adult fiction, and relevant non-fiction.

Prisoner B3087 by Alan Gratz

Prisoner B-3087 by Alan Gratz

Survive. At any cost. 10 concentration camps. 10 different places where you are starved, tortured, and worked mercilessly. It’s something no one could imagine surviving. But it is what Yanek Gruener has to face. As a Jewish boy in 1930s Poland, Yanek is at the mercy of the Nazis who have taken over. Everything he has, and everyone he loves, have been snatched brutally from him. And then Yanek himself is taken prison, his arm tattooed with the words PRISONER B-3087. He is forced from one nightmarish concentration camp to another, as World War II rages… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Antisemitism & Nazism
  • Death of a parent
  • Death of a friend
  • Imprisonment in concentration camps (theme)
  • War World Two & the Holocaust

Refugee by Alan Gratz

Josef is a Jewish boy in 1930s Nazi Germany. With the threat of concentration camps looming, he and his family board a ship bound for the other side of the world. Isabel is a Cuban girl in 1994. With riots and unrest plaguing her country, she and her family set out on a raft, hoping to find safety and freedom in America. Mahmoud is a Syrian boy in 2015. With his homeland torn apart by violence and destruction, he and his family begin a long trek toward Europe. All three young people will go on harrowing journeys in search of refuge. All will face unimaginable dangers… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Period-typical antisemitism & Nazism
  • Attempted suicide & suicidal ideation of a grandparent due to trauma sustained in a concentration camp
  • Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
  • Blood & injury depiction, including the mention of the floating dead body with gunshot wounds
  • Physical assault (beating)
  • Police violence
  • Riots, specifically in 1994 Cuba
  • Home invasion
  • Destruction of a home & buildings from a missile strike
  • WWII themes, including detainment in concentration camps
  • Refugee experiences & displacement (theme)
  • Animal attack (secondary character dies from a shark bite)

Grenade by Alan Gratz

Grenade by Alan Gratz

It’s 1945, and the world is in the grip of war. Hideki lives on the island of Okinawa, near Japan. When WWII crashes onto his shores, Hideki is drafted into the Blood and Iron Student Corps to fight for the Japanese army. He is handed a grenade and a set of instructions: Don’t come back until you’ve killed an American soldier. Ray, a young American Marine, has just landed on Okinawa. He doesn’t know what to expect — or if he’ll make it out alive. He just knows that the enemy is everywhere. Hideki and Ray each fight their way across the island, surviving heart-pounding ambushes… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Racism & racial slurs
  • Suicide
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Death of a child
  • Explosions
  • Gun violence
  • War World Two & military violence (theme)
  • Colonialism

I Am Not a Serial Killer by Dan Wells

I Am Not a Serial Killer by Dan Wells

John Wayne Cleaver is dangerous, and he knows it. He’s spent his life doing his best not to live up to his potential. He’s obsessed with serial killers but really doesn’t want to become one. So for his own sake, and the safety of those around him, he lives by rigid rules he’s written for himself, practising normal life as if it were a private religion that could save him from damnation. Dead bodies are normal to John. He likes them, actually. They don’t demand or expect the empathy he’s unable to offer. Perhaps that’s what gives him the objectivity to recognize that… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Pyromania
  • Dead bodies
  • Graphic murder
  • Animal cruelty mentioned

Rescue by Jennifer Nielsen

Rescue by Jennifer A. Nielsen

Six hundred and fifty-seven days ago, Meg Kenyon’s father left their home in France to fight for the Allies in World War II, and that was the last time Meg saw him. Recently, she heard he was being held prisoner by the Nazis, a terrible sentence from which Meg fears he’ll never return. All she has left of him are the codes he placed in a jar for her to decipher, an affectionate game the two of them shared. But the codes are running low, and soon there’ll be nothing left of Papa for Meg to hold on to at all. Suddenly, an impossible chance to save her father falls into Meg’s lap. After following… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Antisemitism & Nazism
  • Blood depiction
  • Gun violence
  • Explosion
  • Avalanche
  • World War Two

Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn

Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn

The shadows have risen, and the line is law. All Bree wanted was to uncover the truth behind her mother’s death. So she infiltrated the Legendborn Order, a secret society descended from King Arthur’s knights—only to discover her own ancestral power. Now, Bree has become someone new: A Medium. A Bloodcrafter. A Scion. But the ancient war between demons and the Order is rising to a deadly peak. And Nick, the Legendborn boy Bree fell in love with, has been kidnapped. Bree wants to fight, but the Regents who rule the Order won’t let her. To them… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Misogyny
  • Slavery recounted
  • Rape by enslaver recounted & mentioned, off-page
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Drugging
  • Drug use mentioned (sc)
  • Blood, gore & injury depiction
  • Coma mentioned (sc)
  • Medical experimentation
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Murder of a father mentioned
  • Death of a mother in a car accident recounted
  • Murder& attempted murder
  • Torture
  • Knife violence
  • Immolation
  • Physical assault
  • Kidnapping
  • Loss of autonomy (possession)

Legendborn by Tracy Deonn

Legendborn by Tracy Deonn

After her mother dies in an accident, sixteen-year-old Bree Matthews wants nothing to do with her family memories or childhood home. A residential program for bright high schoolers at UNC–Chapel Hill seems like the perfect escape—until Bree witnesses a magical attack her very first night on campus. A flying demon feeding on human energies. A secret society of so called “Legendborn” students that hunt the creatures down. And a mysterious teenage mage who calls himself a “Merlin” and who attempts—and fails—to wipe Bree’s memory of everything she saw. The Mage… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Slavery
  • Rape recounted
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Hospitalisation
  • Emesis
  • Physical injuries
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a mother in a car accident
  • Loss of autonomy (possession, mind control & memory manipulation)

Obasan by Joy Kogawa

Obasan by Joy Kogawa

Obasan is the moving story of Japanese-Canadians during the Second World War, told through the eyes of a child. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, five-year-old Naomi’s life is changed forever. Separated from her mother, she watches bewildered as she and her family become enemy aliens, persecuted and despised in their own land.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Paedophilia & child sexual abuse

Lucy Fights the Flames by Julie Gilbert

Lucy Fights the Flames by Julie Gilbert and illustrated by Alessia Trunfio

In 1911, fourteen-year-old Lucy Morelli lives with her parents, older brother, and several younger siblings in a crowded apartment in the Greenwich Village neighbourhood of New York City. Lucy dreams of going to college, but her Italian immigrant family relies heavily on her income from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory to survive. Lucy finds the factory work boring, but the working conditions are better than many other jobs. But when Lucy and her best friend, Rosie, head to work one Saturday in March, everything changes. Fire breaks out in the factory, and the doors… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a child
  • Death of a friend
  • Fire (theme)

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Charlie is a freshman. And while he’s not the biggest geek in the school, he is by no means popular. Shy, introspective, intelligent beyond his years yet socially awkward, he is a wallflower, caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it. Charlie is attempting to navigate his way through uncharted territory: the world of first dates and mixed tapes, family dramas and new friends; the world of sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, when all one requires is that perfect song on that perfect drive to feel infinite. But Charlie can’t stay on the sideline forever. Standing on the fringes of lifee… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Homophobia, ableism & racism
  • Paedophilia & sexual assault of a child recounted
  • Physical child abuse recounted
  • Intimate partner violence*
  • Alcohol consumption, recreational drug use & smoking
  • Abortion (secondary character)
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of an aunt in a car accident
  • Death of a friend from suicide (theme)
  • Physical assault (fistfights)

*Context : The protagonist’s sister is physically abused by her boyfriend who she continues to date. The protagonist also accompanies her to have an abortion.