The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer

Years ago, a reclusive mega-bestselling children’s author quit writing under mysterious circumstances. Suddenly he resurfaces with a brand-new book and a one-of-a-kind competition, offering a prize that will change the winner’s life in this absorbing and whimsical novel.

Lucy Hart knows better than anyone what it’s like to grow up without parents who loved her. In a childhood marked by neglect and loneliness, Lucy found her solace in books, namely the Clock Island series by Jack Masterson… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Parental abandonment
  • Child abuse and neglect recounted
  • Foster care experiences
  • Emotionally abusive relationship recounted
  • Munchausen by Proxy mentioned*
  • Alcoholism and substance addiction recovery (love interest)
  • Alcohol consumption & abuse
  • Unplanned pregnancy & miscarriage mentioned
  • Sibling with terminal cancer
  • Death of a brother from complications during heart surgery recounted
  • Financial and housing insecurity

*Context: The protagonist learns her sister’s childhood chronic illness was the result of her parents’ attempts to keep her sick. Discussions of children in foster care due to abusive alcoholic parents and parents’ deaths from overdoses.

How to Find a Missing Girl by Victoria Wlosok

A year ago, beloved cheerleader Stella Blackthorn vanished without a trace. Devastated, her younger sister, Iris, launched her own investigation, but all she managed to do was scare off the police’s only lead and earn a stern warning: Once she turns eighteen, more meddling means prison-level consequences.

Then, a year later, the unthinkable happens. Iris’s ex-girlfriend, Heather, goes missing, too—just after dropping the polarizing last episode of her true crime podcast all about Iris’s sister… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Grooming by a teacher
  • Alcoholism mentioned
  • Drunk-driving car accident

Things We Left Behind by Lucy Score

There was only one woman who could set me free. But I would rather set myself on fire than ask Sloane Walton for anything.

Lucian Rollins is a lean, mean vengeance-seeking mogul. On a quest to erase his father’s mark on the family name, he spends every waking minute pulling strings and building an indestructible empire. The more money and power he amasses, the safer he is from threats… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Domestic violence, on-page
  • Alcoholism
  • Death of a parent from cancer
  • Fire

The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff

Geeta’s no-good husband disappeared five years ago. She didn’t kill him, but everyone thinks she did–no matter how much she protests.

But she soon discovers that being known as a “self-made” widow has some surprising perks. No one messes with her, no one threatens her, and no one tries to control (ahem, marry) her. It’s even been good for her business; no one wants to risk getting on her bad side by not buying her jewelry… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Misogyny
  • Classism
  • Fatmisia & body-shaming
  • Rape & attempted rape
  • Sexual assault
  • Domestic violence
  • Alcoholism
  • Murder of a husband
  • Acid attacks mentioned

The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende

This powerful and moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea weaves together past and present, tracing the ripple effects of war and immigration on one child in Europe in 1938 and another in the United States in 2019.

Vienna, 1938. Samuel Adler was six years old when his father disappeared during Kristallnacht—the night their family lost everything. Samuel’s mother secured a spot for him on the last Kindertransport train out of Nazi-occupied Austria to the United Kingdom, which he boarded alone, carrying nothing but a change of clothes and his violin… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Antisemitism
  • Rape mentioned
  • Sexual assault of a child
  • Domestic violence mentioned
  • Alcoholism mentioned
  • Suicide
  • Torture mentioned
  • War themes including the depiction of a pogrom & Kristallnacht

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

This is a story about Peter Duke who went on to be a famous actor. This is a story about falling in love with Peter Duke who wasn’t famous at all. It’s about falling so wildly in love with him – the way one will at twenty-four – that it felt like jumping off a roof at midnight. There was no way to foresee the mess it would come to in the end.

It’s spring and Lara’s three grown daughters have returned to the family orchard… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Alcoholism
  • Cheating mentioned
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Drug abuse
  • Abortion
  • COVID-19 pandemic mentioned
  • Death of a grandmother from breast cancer
  • Drowning

Bad Cree by Jessica Johns

When Mackenzie wakes up with a severed crow’s head in her hands, she panics. Only moments earlier she had been fending off masses of birds in a snow-covered forest. In bed, when she blinks, the head disappears.

Night after night, Mackenzie’s dreams return her to a memory from before her sister Sabrina’s untimely death: a weekend at the family’s lakefront campsite, long obscured by a fog of guilt. But when the waking world starts closing in, too–a murder of crows stalks her every move… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Alcoholism discussed
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Death of a sibling
  • Drowning
  • Animal death (birds)

The Remaking by Clay McLeod Chapman

Ella Louise has lived in the woods surrounding Pilot’s Creek, Virginia, for nearly a decade. Publicly, she and her daughter Jessica are shunned by their upper-crust family and the Pilot’s Creek residents. Privately, desperate townspeople visit her apothecary for a cure to what ails them—until Ella Louise is blamed for the death of a prominent customer. Accused of witchcraft, both mother and daughter are burned at the stake in the middle of the night. Ella Louise’s burial site is never found, but the little girl has the most famous grave in the South: a steel-reinforced coffin surrounded by a fence of interconnected white crosses… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Suicide
  • Substance addiction
  • Alcoholism
  • Immolation
  • Bullying

Sink or Swim by Tessa Bailey

Andrew Prince wakes up before everyone else. He schedules the bar shifts, demands perfection from Long Beach’s lifeguards—most of all himself—and makes sure the family debts are paid. His unfaltering work ethic might leave him exhausted, but it comes with one advantage. It distracts him from the love he’s been harbouring since childhood for the girl next door—who he cannot have. Jiya Dalal has dreams. To fly a plane, see the world below…and prove irresistible to her best friend, Andrew. But she needs to be a good daughter first, which is becoming an increasingly difficult task, since her parents expect a good marriage… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Child abuse recounted
  • Parent with alcoholism recounted
  • Murder of a father recounted
  • Physical assault
  • Police violence & corruption

Mouth to Mouth by Tessa Bailey

A man with a prison record has no place around a fresh faced college student. Tell that to Rory Prince. He should stay the hell away from Olive Cunningham. There’s one small problem, though. She won’t stop almost getting killed—and with this too-smart, too-sweet girl holding his heart in her hands, Rory is powerless to do anything but keep saving her. Homeschooled from a young age, Olive is now out on her own and discovering the world, one milkshake flavor at a time. Until recently, she has experienced life through books. She’s walked in a million… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Homomisic hate crime*
  • Child abuse & neglect recounted
  • Parent with alcoholism recounted
  • Coma mentioned*
  • Physical assault*
  • Imprisonment
  • Drowning*

*Context : The male protagonist was sentenced to jail for putting a man, who was committing a hate crime by attempting to drown the protagonist’s gay older brother, in a coma.