Tag Archives: Alcohol Consumption & Abuse

Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park

Young is a cynical yet fun-loving Korean student who pinballs from home to class to the beds of recent Tinder matches. He and Jaehee, his female best friend and roommate, frequent nearby bars where they push away their anxieties about their love lives, families, and money with rounds of soju and ice-cold Marlboro Reds that they keep in their freezer. Yet over time, even Jaehee leaves Young to settle down, leaving him alone to care for his ailing mother and to find companionship in his relationships with a series of men, including one whose handsomeness is matched by his coldness, and another who might end up being the great love of his life… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Homomisia
  • Dubious consent scenario
  • Depression
  • Suicide
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Cancer
  • Sexually transmitted diseases, specifically HIV & AIDS

The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

Amina al-Sirafi should be content. After a storied and scandalous career as one of the Indian Ocean’s most notorious pirates, she’s survived backstabbing rogues, vengeful merchant princes, several husbands, and one actual demon to retire peacefully with her family to a life of piety, motherhood, and absolutely nothing that hints of the supernatural.

But when she’s tracked down by the obscenely wealthy mother of a former crewman, she’s offered a job no bandit could refuse… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Transmisia
  • Slavery
  • Rape threatened
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Loss of autonomy, by possession
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Dead bodies
  • Murder
  • Knife violence
  • Torture
  • Poisoning
  • Fire
  • Genocide mentioned
  • Fantastical animal attack

Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. The tower and its students are the world’s center for translation and, more importantly, magic.

For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism, including slurs & cultural appropriation
  • Classism
  • Colourism
  • Misogyny & sexism
  • Islamophobia
  • Violent hate crime
  • Slavery, including child labour
  • Sexual assault
  • Suicide discussed
  • Self-harm
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Drug use
  • Blood depiction
  • Emesis
  • Feet binding discussed
  • Plague
  • Death of mother
  • Grief depiction
  • Murder
  • Police brutality
  • Genocide
  • Gun violence
  • Torture
  • Physical assault
  • Colonization
  • War themes

The Invisible Life of Addie Larue by V.E. Schwab

France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world. But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Sexism
  • Homomisia mentioned
  • Sexual assault
  • Prostitution
  • Intimate domestic abuse
  • Depression
  • Attempted suicide
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Drug & alcohol abuse
  • Starvation
  • Cancer recounted
  • Death of a loved one
  • Grief depiction
  • Physical assault
  • Imprisonment
  • War themes

The It Girl by Ruth Ware

It was Hannah who found April’s body ten years ago.
It was Hannah who didn’t question what she saw that day.
Did her testimony put an innocent man in prison?

She needs to know the truth.

Even if it means questioning her own friends.
Even if it means putting her own life at risk.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Cheating
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Recreational drug use
  • Pregnancy
  • Death of a friend
  • Grief depiction
  • Murder
  • Stalking discussed
  • Home invasion
  • Incarceration, including discussed of wrongful conviction

The Nightmare Man by J.H. Markert

Blackwood mansion looms, surrounded by nightmare pines, atop the hill over the small town of New Haven. Ben Bookman, bestselling novelist and heir to the Blackwood estate, spent a weekend at the ancestral home to finish writing his latest horror novel, The Scarecrow. Now, on the eve of the book’s release, the terrible story within begins to unfold in real life. Detective Mills arrives at the scene of a gruesome murder: a family butchered and bundled inside cocoons stitched from corn husks, and hung from the rafters of a barn, eerily mirroring the opening of Bookman’s latest novel. When another family is killed in… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Sexual assault
  • Self-harm, specifically cutting
  • Alcohol consumption & abuse
  • Drug use & abuse
  • Blood depiction
  • Murder
  • Disappearance of children
  • Animal cruelty

How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix

When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesn’t want to leave her daughter with her ex and fly to Charleston. She doesn’t want to deal with her family home, stuffed to the rafters with the remnants of her father’s academic career and her mother’s lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. She doesn’t want to learn how to live without the two people who knew and loved her best in the world.
Most of all, she doesn’t want to deal with her brother, Mark, who never left their hometown, gets fired from one job after another, and resents her success. Unfortunately, she’ll need his help to get… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Panic attack mentioned
  • Alcohol consumption with implications of alcohol abuse, on- & off-page
  • Pregnancy mentioned (prologue)
  • Graphic body horror
  • Detailed blood and injury depiction including eye trauma and an on-page arm amputation
  • Surgery and medical treatment, off-page
  • Hospitalisation, on-page
  • Needles, on-page
  • Grief and loss depiction (theme)
  • Death of a mother and father in a car accident, off-page
  • Death of a child from lockjaw mentioned
  • Death of a child and brother from drowning mentioned including a near-drowning incident recounted
  • Gun violence
  • Physical assault including assault with a hammer
  • Fire
  • Loss of autonomy (possession)
  • Animal attack (dog)
  • Animal dead bodies and taxidermy discussed (squirrels)

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars: same year at Yale, same debut year in publishing. But Athena’s a cross-genre literary darling, and June didn’t even get a paperback release. Nobody wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks. So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers to the British and French war efforts during World War I.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism, including microaggressions & slurs
  • Bullying
  • Cyberharassment, including doxxing
  • Sexual assault & rape recounted
  • Emotional abuse, specifically gaslighting
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Emesis
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a daughter
  • Death of a friend
  • Graphic death by choking

Bone China by Laura Purcell

Consumption has ravaged Louise Pinecroft’s family, leaving her and her father alone and heartbroken. But Dr Pinecroft has plans for a revolutionary experiment: convinced that sea air will prove to be the cure his wife and children needed, he arranges to house a group of prisoners suffering from the same disease in the cliffs beneath his new Cornish home. While he devotes himself to his controversial medical trials, Louise finds herself increasingly discomfited by the strange tales her new maid tells of the fairies that hunt the land, searching for those they can steal away to their realm. Forty years later, Hester Why arrives at… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism & racial slurs
  • Ableism
  • Classism
  • Alcoholism
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Pregnancy
  • Miscarriage
  • Infertility
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Blood depiction
  • Emesis
  • Death of a parent
  • Murder
  • Drowning
  • Kidnapping

To Catch a Raven by Beverly Jenkins

Lying and cheating may be sins to some people, but for Raven Moreaux, it is a way of life. She comes from a long line of grifters and couldn’t be prouder…Until she’s forced to help the government. A former Confederate official is suspected of stealing the Declaration of Independence, and Raven, posing as his housekeeper, is tasked with getting it back. Her partner is the too handsome Braxton Steel. Masquerading as a valet/driver, Brax is also supposed to be her “husband.” He has his own reasons for doing this job, but when their pretend marriage ignites into fiery… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Slavery recounted
  • Racism
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Drugging
  • Pregnancy & childbirth, off-page
  • Yellow Fever epidemic, off-page
  • Murder, off-page
  • Lynching mentioned
  • Imprisonment recounted
  • Blackmail