Category Archives: Representation

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind–and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi, her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa’s orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband. Private property, Frances believes, is a cultural evil–and Nick, a bored actor who never quite lived up to his potential, looks like patriarchy made flesh. But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expects. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Domestic abuse recounted
  • Self harm
  • Alcohol abuse
  • Miscarriage mentioned
  • Endometriosis

Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult

Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult

Ruth Jefferson is a labor and delivery nurse at a Connecticut hospital with more than twenty years’ experience. During her shift, Ruth begins a routine checkup on a newborn, only to be told a few minutes later that she’s been reassigned to another patient. The parents are white supremacists and don’t want Ruth, who is African American, to touch their child. The hospital complies with their request, but the next day, the baby goes into cardiac distress while Ruth is alone in the nursery. Does she obey orders or does she intervene?

Ruth hesitates before performing CPR and, as a result, is charged with a serious crime. Kennedy McQuarrie, a white public defender, takes her case but gives unexpected advice: Kennedy insists that mentioning race in the courtroom is not a winning strategy… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism
  • Pregnancy & childbirth
  • Death of a newborn

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism
  • Classism
  • Domestic abuse
  • Animal cruelty

The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue 

The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue

In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city centre, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. Into Julia’s regimented world step two outsiders—Doctor Kathleen Lynn, a rumoured Rebel on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney.

In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other’s lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Child sexual abuse recounted
  • Domestic abuse mentioned
  • Suicide mentioned
  • Childbirth
  • Stillborn & miscarriage
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Hospitalisation
  • Pandemic

The Glass Castle by James Dashner

The Glass Castle by James Dashner

Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity was both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children’s imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and above all, how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary, who painted and wrote and couldn’t stand the responsibility of providing for her family, called herself an “excitement addict.” Cooking a meal that would be consumed in fifteen… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Sexual assault of a child
  • Child abuse & neglect
  • Alcohol abuse

Constant by Lexi Ander

Constant by Lexi Ander

Chief Warlord Sohm’lan has a job he loves protecting the family who claims him as one of their own. He has known the loss of a mate and believed he would walk alone for the rest of his life… that is until Prince Mestor demanded more from him than duty. Unable to fathom why Mestor would want a widowed older warrior, Sohm’lan maintains his distance believing Mestor will eventually choose an amor closer in age and experience, even though the thought causes him more pain than it should.

Prince Mestor is tired of pretending and his patience is eroding. He needs Sohm’lan to see past their respective ranks and duties to who Mestor is underneath it all. Worried Sohm’lan will be lost to him if he pushes too hard, Mestor and Sohm’lan are caught in a dance of denied desires and tangled obligations… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Child abuse
  • Graphic physical injury
  • Exile

Striker by Lexi Ander

Striker by Lexi Ander

The peaceful respite for which Zeus and his intended, Dargon and Alpha, had been hoping is shattered when Zeus is unexpectedly drawn to the Waters of Poseidon and told that the safety they’ve been promised is a trap. But the Fal’Amoric aren’t the only important cargo on the Oethra 7, and countless others are depending on the success of their mission. If Zeus hopes to break the silent siege on Valespia and protect those most precious to him, he will need not just powerful allies but the fortitude to survive overwhelming odds.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Abusive relationship recounted
  • Pregnancy & childbirth
  • Nonconsensual surgery on intersex child
  • Medical experimentation
  • Torture
  • Kidnapping

First Moon by Richard Amos

First Moon by Richard Amos

Need someone, or something, hunted down? Akira Murakami is your man! No target is too small for him to get his energy-sucking blades swinging, and all jobs are welcome at the right price. The bills have to be paid after all.

Living in a world where the apocalypse almost happened can be complicated, as is being the hybrid son of the High Werewolf of, well, everything. But Akira likes to live a relatively simpler life than dear old papa would like, shunning all the political crap, living by the sword and perfecting that recipe for dark chocolate and raspberry brownies. Killing is easy. Brownies are easy. Too easy. To hell with the simple life!

There’s a werewolf killer stalking the city, and Akira is about to be caught in the middle of everything.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Homomisia
  • Bullying mentioned

Sharing a House with the Never-Ending Man by Steve Alpert

Sharing a House with the Never-Ending Man by Steve Alpert

This highly entertaining business memoir describes what it was like to work for Japan’s premier animation studio, Studio Ghibli, and its reigning genius Hayao Miyazaki. Steve Alpert, a Japanese-speaking American, was the “resident foreigner” in the offices of Ghibli and its parent Tokuma Shoten and played a central role when Miyazaki’s films were starting to take off in international markets. Alpert describes hauling heavy film canisters of Princess Mononoke to Russia and California, experiencing a screaming Harvey Weinstein, dealing with Disney marketers, and then triumphantly attending glittering galas celebrating the Oscar-winning Spirited Away.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Rape mentioned
  • War themes

The Girl and the Ghost by Hanna Alkaf 

The Girl and the Ghost by Hanna Alkaf

I am a dark spirit, the ghost announced grandly. I am your inheritance, your grandmother’s legacy. I am yours to command.

Suraya is delighted when her witch grandmother gifts her a pelesit. She names her ghostly companion Pink, and the two quickly become inseparable.

But Suraya doesn’t know that pelesits have a dark side—and when Pink’s shadows threaten to consume them both, they must find enough light to survive . . . before they are both lost to the darkness.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Death of a child
  • Bullying