The Girl with the Red Balloon by Katherine Locke

The Girl with the Red Balloon by Katherine Locke

When sixteen-year-old Ellie Baum accidentally time-travels via red balloon to 1988 East Berlin, she’s caught up in a conspiracy of history and magic. She meets members of an underground guild in East Berlin who use balloons and magic to help people escape over the Wall—but even to the balloon makers, Ellie’s time travel is a mystery. When it becomes clear that someone is using dark magic to change history, Ellie must risk everything—including her only way home—to stop the process.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Antiziganism
  • Death of a parent
  • Death of a sibling
  • Murder
  • Fire
  • The Holocaust & war themes
  • Interment & concentration camps

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas 

Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantès is confined to the grim fortress of the Château d’If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and becomes determined not only to escape but to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. A huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s, Dumas was inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment when writing his epic tale of suffering and retribution.

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Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Period-typical racial slurs & antiziganism (g slur)
  • Slavery
  • Rape
  • Domestic abuse
  • Alcoholism
  • Miscarriage
  • Death by starvation
  • Cannibalism mentioned
  • Death of a child & attempted infanticide
  • Torture
  • Wrongful imprisonment

A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

It’s 1895, and after the suicide of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence, a proper boarding school in England. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma’s reception there is a chilly one. To make things worse, she’s been followed by a mysterious young Indian man, a man sent to watch her. But why? What is her destiny? And what will her entanglement with Spence’s most powerful girls—and their foray into the spiritual world—lead to?

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Sexism
  • Antiziganism
  • Parent with substance addiction
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Suicide
  • Self-harm
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Dead body
  • Death of a mother from suicide by knife violence
  • Death of a child by suffocation
  • Murder
  • Fire
  • Animal death & cruelty
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The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn

The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn

Anna Fox lives alone, a recluse in her New York City home, unable to venture outside. She spends her day drinking wine (maybe too much), watching old movies, recalling happier times . . . and spying on her neighbors.

Then the Russells move into the house across the way: a father, a mother and their teenage son. The perfect family. But when Anna, gazing out her window one night, sees something she shouldn’t, her world begins to crumble and its shocking secrets are laid bare.

What is real? What is imagined? Who is in danger? Who is in control? In this diabolically gripping thriller, no one—and nothing—is what it seems. 

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Antiziganism
  • Depression
  • Anxiety & panic attacks
  • Agoraphobia
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Alcohol consumption & abuse
  • Prescription drug abuse
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a child & husband in a car accident recounted
  • Murder
  • Stalking
  • Animal death mentioned
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Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet fishing village. Kya Clark is barefoot and wild; unfit for polite society. So in late 1969, when the popular Chase Andrews is found dead, locals immediately suspect her.

But Kya is not what they say. A born naturalist with just one day of school, she takes life’s lessons from the land, learning the real ways of the world from the dishonest signals of fireflies. But while she has the skills to live in solitude forever, the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. Drawn to two young men from town, Kya opens herself to a new and startling world–until the unthinkable happens.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Slavery mentioned
  • Racism & racial slurs
  • Antiziganism
  • Victim blaming
  • Slut shaming
  • Domestic abuse
  • Child neglect
  • Suicide mentioned
  • Murder
  • Animal death
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Babayaga by Toby Barlow

Babayaga by Toby Barlow

Will is a young American ad executive in Paris. Except his agency is a front for the CIA. It’s 1959 and the cold war is going strong. But Will doesn’t think he’s a warrior—he’s just a good-hearted Detroit ad guy who can’t seem to figure out Parisian girls.

Zoya is a beautiful young woman wandering “les boulevards, “sad-eyed, coming off a bad breakup. In fact, she impaled her ex on a spike. Zoya, it turns out, has been a beautiful young woman for hundreds of years; she and her far more traditionally witchy-looking companion, Elga, have been thriving unnoticed in the bloody froth of Europe’s wars… Read more.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism & racial slurs
  • Antiziganism (g slur)
  • Slut shaming
  • Rape
  • Cheating
  • Recreational drug use
  • Overdose
  • Murder
  • Infantcide
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The Major’s Welcome Home by Tessa Bailey

The Major’s Welcome Home by Tessa Bailey

When Kenna Sutton is tasked with driving home newly returned Beck “True Blue” Collier, she expects the strategic Army mastermind to be a pasty number cruncher. Never at a loss for words, Kenna is nonetheless rendered speechless by the gorgeous, hard-bodied and utterly inexperienced Army Major that lands in her passenger seat. Outraged by Beck’s lack of a welcome home after seven long years overseas, Kenna takes matters into her own hands, giving Beck something he’s only ever fantasized about in his bunk.

Beck has never shied away from a test of will and Kenna gives new meaning to the word challenge. One problem? Kenna’s father… Read more.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Abandonment
  • Antiziganism (g slur)
  • Heart attacks mentioned
  • War & military service mentioned
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All in by Simona Ahrnstedt

All in by Simona Ahrnstedt

In the cutthroat world of Sweden’s financial elite, no one knows that better than corporate raider David Hammar. Ruthless. Notorious. Unstoppable. He’s out to hijack the ultimate prize: Investum. After years of planning, all the players are in place; he needs just one member of the aristocratic owning family on his side Natalia De la Grip.
Elegant, brilliant, driven, Natalia is curious about David s unexpected invitation to lunch. Everyone knows that he is rich, dangerous, and unethical. But she soon discovers he is also deeply scarred.

The attraction between these two is impossible, but the long Swedish nights unfold an affair that will bring to light shocking secrets, and force both Natalia and David to confront their innermost fears and desires.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Ableism & ableist slurs
  • Racism & racial slurs
  • Antiziganism
  • Classism
  • Slut shaming
  • Intimate partner abuse
  • Emotional parent abuse
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Scars
  • Bullying & hazing recounted
  • Animal abuse mentioned
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The Route of Ice and Salt by José Luis Zárate

The Route of Ice and Salt by José Luis Zárate 

It’s an ordinary assignment, nothing more. The cargo? Fifty boxes filled with Transylvanian soil. The route? From Varna to Whitby. The Demeter has made many trips like this. The captain has handled dozens of crews.

He dreams familiar dreams: to taste the salt on the skin of his men, to run his hands across their chests. He longs for the warmth of a lover he cannot have, fantasizes about flesh and frenzied embraces. All this he’s done before, it’s routine, a constant, like the tides.

Yet there’s something different, something wrong. There are odd nightmares, unsettling omens and fear. For there is something in the air. Someone stalking the ship.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Antiziganism (g slur)
  • Homomisia & internalised homomisia
  • Hate crimes
  • Suicide
  • Blood & gore depiction
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The Betrothed by Kiera Cass

The Betrothed by Kiera Cass

When King Jameson declares his love for Lady Hollis Brite, Hollis is shocked—and thrilled. After all, she’s grown up at Keresken Castle, vying for the king’s attention alongside other daughters of the nobility. Capturing his heart is a dream come true.

But Hollis soon realizes that falling in love with a king and being crowned queen may not be the happily ever after she thought it would be. And when she meets a commoner with the mysterious power to see right into her heart, she finds that the future she really wants is one that she never thought to imagine. 

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Classism
  • Misogyny
  • Antiziganism (g slur)
  • Arranged marriage discussed
  • Domestic abuse
  • Cheating, grey-area
  • Miscarriage
  • Pregnancy discussed
  • Death of a parent
  • Death of a husband
  • Death of a son
  • Murder
  • Fire
  • Home invasion
  • War themes
  • Bullying, recounted
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