Tag Archives: Adult-Minor Relationship

This page lists books that contain trigger warnings for the depiction of adult-minor relationships, including all romantic, sexual and/or queerplatonic relationships between an individual under the age of eighteen (a ‘minor’) and an adult.

The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley

Adela Woods is sixteen years old and pregnant. Her parents banish her from her comfortable upbringing in Indiana to her grandmother’s home in the small town of Padua Beach, Florida. When she arrives, Adela meets Emory, who brings her newborn to high school, determined to graduate despite the odds; Simone, mother of four-year-old twins, weighs her options when she finds herself pregnant again; and the rest of the Girls, a group of outcast young moms who raise their growing brood in the back of Simone’s red truck. The town thinks the Girls have lost their way… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Adult-minor relationships discussed
  • Familial estrangement due to teen pregnancy
  • Racism
  • Pregnancy & childbirth (theme, on-page), including discussion of the stigma around teen pregnancy & parenthood
  • Abortion discussed

Context: One protagonist became pregnant and gave birth to her first daughter at age 16 when her boyfriend was 22. The other protagonists were sixteen & seventeen when they gave birth.

A Girl Named Digit by Annabel Monaghan

Farrah “Digit” Higgins may be going to MIT in the fall, but this L.A. high school genius has left her geek self behind in another school district so she can blend in with the popular crowd at Santa Monica High and actually enjoy her senior year. But when Farrah, the daughter of a UCLA math professor, unknowingly cracks a terrorist group’s number sequence, her laid-back senior year gets a lot more interesting. Soon she is personally investigating the case, on the run from terrorists, and faking her own kidnapping– all while trying to convince a young, hot FBI agent to take her seriously. So much for blending in . . .

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Adult-minor relationship*
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Terrorism discussed

*Context : The protagonist is a 17-year-old girl and her love interest is a 23-year-old man who ‘won’t take the relationship further’ until she turns 18.

Dark Notes by Pam Godwin

They call me a slut. Maybe I am. Sometimes I do things I despise. Sometimes men take without asking. But I have a musical gift, only a year left of high school, and a plan.
With one obstacle. Emeric Marceaux doesn’t just take.
He seizes my will power and bangs it like a dark note.
When he commands me to play, I want to give him everything. I kneel for his punishments, tremble for his touch, and risk it all for our stolen moments. He’s my obsession, my master, my music. And my teacher…

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Sibling abuse (protagonist)
  • Rape of a minor (multiple, protagonist)
  • Underrage sex work mentioned
  • Adult-minor teacher-student relationship (theme) between a 17-year-old high school student and her 27-year-old music teacher & mentor
  • Parent with substance addiction (protagonist)
  • Poverty (protagonist)

Missing Clarissa by Ripley Jones

In August of 1999, dazzlingly popular cheerleader Clarissa Campbell disappears from a party in the woods outside the rural town of Oreville, Washington and is never seen again. The police question her friends, teachers, and the adults who knew her—who all have something to hide. And thanks to Clarissa’s beauty, the mystery captures the attention of the nation. But with no leads and no body, the case soon grows cold. Despite the efforts of internet sleuths and true-crime aficionados, Clarissa is never found—dead or alive. Over twenty years later, Oreville high school… Read more,

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Ableism, racism & homophobia mentioned
  • Adult-minor teacher-student relationship & statutory rape
  • Blood & injury depiction
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Murder & attempted murder
  • Gun violence
  • Kidnapping

The Other Lola by Ripley Jones

In the months after Cam and Blair broke their small hometown’s legendary missing-girl story and catapulted to accidental fame, they vowed never to do it again. No more mysteries, no more podcasts, and no more sticking their heads where they don’t belong. Until Mattie Brosillard, a freshman at their high school, shows up on their doorstep, begging Cam and Blair for help. Mattie’s sister Lola disappeared mysteriously five years ago. No trace of her was ever found. Now, she’s back–but Mattie is convinced the girl who returned is an impostor. Nobody believes Mattie’s wild story–not Mattie’s brother, not Mattie’s mother, and… Read more,

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Homophobia
  • Adult-minor relationship mentioned
  • Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) & panic attack
  • Child abuse
  • Alcohol consumption & drug use
  • Catfishing
  • Bullying

Fable for the End of the World by Ava Reid

By encouraging massive accumulations of debt from its underclass, a single corporation, Caerus, controls all aspects of society. Inesa lives with her brother in a half-sunken town where they scrape by running a taxidermy shop. Unbeknownst to Inesa, their cruel and indolent mother has accrued an enormous debt—enough to qualify one of her children for Caerus’s livestreamed assassination spectacle: the Lamb’s Gauntlet. Melinoë is a Caerus assassin, trained to track and kill the sacrificial Lambs. The product of neural reconditioning and physiological alteration, she is a living weapon, known for her cold brutality and deadly beauty… Read more,

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Sexual harassment
  • Adult-minor relationship
  • Blood, gore & injury depiction
  • Emesis
  • Death of a child
  • Gun violence
  • Animal death

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty of life here, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, eighteen and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, seventeen, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; nine-year-old Orly, obsessed… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Adult-minor relationship
  • Infidelity
  • Death of a spouse from cancer
  • Drowning
  • Wildfire
  • Animal cruelty recounted

Where the Dark Stands Still by A.B. Poranek

Raised in a small village near the spirit-wood, Liska Radost knows that Magic is monstrous, and its practitioners, monsters. After Liska unleashes her own powers with devastating consequences, she is caught by the demon warden of the wood – the Leszy – who offers her a bargain: one year of servitude in exchange for a wish.Whisked away to his crumbling manor, Liska soon discovers the sinister roots of their bargain. And if she wants to survive the year and return home, she must unravel her host’s spool of secrets and face the ghosts of his past. Those who enter the wood do not always return…

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Adult-minor relationship (17-year old and an ancient being)
  • Domestic violence & child abuse mentioned
  • Graphic blood & gore depiction and body horror
  • Death of a father recounted
  • Fire

Perfect Little Monsters by Cindy R.X. He

Ella Moore was the most popular girl in school…and also the most hated. When she’s murdered at her own party, there are too many suspects to count–and too many people who think she deserved it. The police’s prime suspect is the new girl, Dawn Foster. She was the last to hand Ella a drink on the night Ella died. Plus, all of Ella’s friends with a motive for wanting her dead are more than willing to implicate Dawn. But Dawn refuses to go down without a fight. She’s determined to clear her name. As she delves deeper into the past, she discovers that Ella and her friends had… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Fatphobia & body-shaming
  • Adult-minor relationship & toxic friendships
  • Disordered eating
  • Attempted suicide & suicidal ideation
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Hospitalisation
  • Death of a parent
  • Murder
  • Car accident
  • Fire
  • Kidnapping & stalking
  • Bullying & cyberbullying

Pretty Dead Queens by Alexa Donne

After the death of her mom, 17-year-old Cecelia Ellis goes to live with her estranged grandmother, a celebrated author whose Victorian mansion is as creepy as the murder mysteries she writes. On the surface, life is utterly ordinary until the homecoming queen is murdered. And she’s not Seaview’s first pretty dead queen. With a copycat killer on the loose, Cecelia throws herself into the investigation, determined to crack the case like the heroines in her grandmother’s books. But the more Cecelia digs into the town’s secrets, the more she worries that her own mystery might not have a storybook ending….

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Classism, racism & homophobia
  • Adult-minor relationship mentioned
  • Alcohol consumption & drug use mentioned
  • Minor blood & gore depiction including mentions of dead bodies & emesis
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a mother from cancer recounted & discussed
  • Murder & knife violence
  • Drowning
  • Animal death (rabbit, dog)