Tag Archives: Animal Cruelty, Abuse & Torture

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

Lou Clark knows lots of things. She knows she likes working in The Buttered Bun tea shop and she knows she might not love her boyfriend Patrick. What Lou doesn’t know is she’s about to lose her job or that knowing what’s coming is what keeps her sane. Will Traynor knows his motorcycle accident took away his desire to live. He knows everything feels rather joyless now and he knows exactly how he’s going to put a stop to that. What Will doesn’t know is that Lou is about to burst into his world in a riot of colour. And neither of them knows they’re going to change the other for all time.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Ableism
  • Fatphobia & body-shaming from relatives
  • Gang rape recounted
  • Paraplegia due to a motorcycle accident
  • Depression & suicidal ideation including discussions of a planned suicide and death by physician-assisted suicide
  • Alcohol consumption

On the Savage Side by Tiffany McDaniel

Arcade and Daffodil are twins born one minute apart. With their fiery red hair and thirst for escape, they form an unbreakable bond nurtured by their grandmother’s stories. Together, they disappear into their imaginations and forge a world all their own. But what the two sisters can’t escape are the generational ghosts that haunt their family. Growing up in the shadow of their rural Ohio town, the sisters cling tightly to one another. Years later, Arcade wrestles with the memories of her early life, just as a local woman is discovered drowned in the river. Soon, more bodies are found. As her… Read More.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Sex work
  • Graphic drug use
  • Death of a parent mentioned
  • Murder & torture
  • Animal cruelty

All Men of Genius by Lev A.C. Rosen

Violet Adams wants to attend Illyria College, a widely renowned school for the most brilliant up-and-coming scientific minds, founded by the late Duke Illyria, the greatest scientist of the Victorian Age. The school is run by his son, Ernest, who continues his father’s policy that the small, exclusive college remain male-only. Violet sees her opportunity when her father departs for America. She disguises herself as her twin brother, Ashton, and gains entry. But keeping the secret of her sex won’t be easy, not with her friend Jack’s constant habit of pulling pranks, and especially not… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Rape & sex work mentioned
  • Animal experimentation

Saha by Cho Nam-Joo

In a country called ‘Town’, Su is found dead in an abandoned car. The suspected killer is presumed to come from the Saha Estates. Town is a privatised country, controlled by a secretive organisation known as the Seven Premiers. It is a society clearly divided into the haves and have-nots and those who have the very least live on the Saha Estates. Among their number is Jin-Kyung, a young woman whose brother, Dok-yung, was in a relationship with Su and quickly becomes the police’s prime suspect. When Dok-yung disappears, Jin Ky-ung is determined to get to the bottom of things.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Ableism & classism
  • Sexual assault
  • Pregnancy & abortion
  • Suicide
  • Death of a child
  • Blood & injury depiction
  • Unethical human experimentation & medical procedures (on-page)
  • Gun violence
  • Police brutality
  • Animal cruelty

Black Cockatoo by Carl Merrison and Hakea Hustler

Mia is a 13-year-old girl from a remote community in the Kimberley. She is saddened by the loss of her brother as he distances himself from the family. She feels powerless to change the things she sees around her, until one day she rescues her totem animal, the dirran black cockatoo, and soon discovers her own inner strength.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Graphic animal death & cruelty

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s debut novel immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family – Pauline, Cholly, Sam and Pecola – in post-Depression 1940s Ohio. Unlovely and unloved, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged white schoolfellows. At once intimate and expansive, unsparing in its truth-telling, The Bluest Eye shows how the past savagely defines the present.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Homophobia
  • Racism & colourism (theme)
  • Graphic rape of an 11-year-old child (on-page)*
  • Sex work mentioned
  • Physical, emotional & psychological child abuse
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Death of an infant
  • Housefire mentioned
  • Animal abuse, injury & death mentioned

Context: Includes passages from the paedophilic rapist’s perspective.

The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

In a shabby house, on a shabby street, in the new capital of Madrid, Luzia Cotado uses scraps of magic to get through her days of endless toil as a scullion. But when her scheming mistress discovers the lump of a servant cowering in the kitchen is actually hiding a talent for little miracles, she demands Luzia use those gifts to better the family’s social position. What begins as simple amusement for the bored nobility takes a perilous turn when Luzia garners the notice of Antonio Pérez, the disgraced secretary to Spain’s king. Still reeling from the defeat of his armada, the… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Period-typical misogyny, antisemitism & religious bigotry
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Death of parents recounted
  • Blood, gore & injury depiction including body horror and emesis
  • Torture indcuding waterboarding
  • Imprisonment
  • Fire
  • Animal cruelty & death (squirrel)

The Perfect Son by Freida McFadden

Erika Cass has a perfect family and a perfect life. Until the evening when two detectives show up at her front door A high school girl has vanished from Erika’s quiet suburban neighbourhood. The police suspect the worst–murder. And Erika’s teenage son, Liam, was the last person to see the girl alive. Erika has always sensed something dark and disturbed in her seemingly perfect older child. She wants to believe he’s innocent, but as the evidence mounts, she can’t deny the truth–Liam may have done the unthinkable. Now she must ask herself: How far will she go to protect her son?

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Infidelity
  • Hospitalisation
  • Starvation & dehydration
  • Death of parents
  • Murder
  • Kidnapping
  • Incarceration
  • Fire
  • Animal death & cruelty

Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce

It is 1950. London is still reeling from World War II, and Margery Benson, a schoolteacher and spinster, is trying to get through life, surviving on scraps. One day, she reaches her breaking point, abandoning her job and small existence to set out on an expedition to the other side of the world in search of her childhood obsession: an insect that may or may not exist–the golden beetle of New Caledonia. When she advertises for an assistant to accompany her, the woman she ends up with is the last person she had in mind. Fun-loving Enid Pretty in her tight-fitting pink suit and pom-pom… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
  • MIscarriage
  • Suicide by gun violence
  • Stalking
  • Death of a pet & animal abuse

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

Florence, the 1550s. Lucrezia, third daughter of the grand duke, is comfortable with her obscure place in the palazzo: free to wonder at its treasures, observe its clandestine workings, and devote herself to her own artistic pursuits. But when her older sister dies on the eve of her wedding to the ruler of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, Lucrezia is thrust unwittingly into the limelight: the duke is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father just as quick to accept on her behalf. Having barely left girlhood behind, Lucrezia must now enter an unfamiliar court whose customs are opaque and where her arrival is not universally welcomed… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Period-typical misogyny
  • Rape mentioned
  • Miscarriage mentioned
  • Animal cruelty mentioned