Tag Archives: Bullying & Hazing

This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel

This is how a family keeps a secret and how that secret ends up keeping them. This is how a family lives happily ever after until happily ever after becomes complicated. This is how children change and then change the world. This is Claude. He’s five years old, the youngest of five brothers, and loves peanut butter sandwiches. He also loves wearing a dress, and dreams of being a princess. When he grows up, Claude says, he wants to be a girl. Rosie and Penn want Claude to be whoever Claude wants to be. They’re just not sure they’re ready to share that with the world. Soon the entire family is keeping Claude’s secret. Until one day it explodes.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Transmisia
  • Homomisia
  • Self-harm mentioned
  • Suicide mentioned
  • Cancer
  • Bullying

Virals by Kathy Reichs

Tory Brennan, niece of acclaimed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan (of the Bones novels and hit TV show), is the leader of a ragtag band of teenage “sci-philes” who live on a secluded island off the coast of South Carolina. When the group rescues a dog caged for medical testing on a nearby island, they are exposed to an experimental strain of canine parvovirus that changes their lives forever. As the friends discover their heightened senses and animal-quick reflexes, they must combine their scientific curiosity with their newfound physical gift… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Murder
  • Kidnapping
  • Bullying
  • Animal injury & cruelty including medical experimentation

The Packing House by G. Donald Cribbs

When 16-year-old Joel Scrivener has a raging nightmare in study hall and someone records it on their phone, he awakens to a living nightmare where everyone knows his secret, one that he’s suppressed for ten years. Reeling as the whole school finds out the truth, Joel takes to the woods, leaving the bullies and his broken home behind. However, life as a runaway isn’t easy, as Joel’s hallucinations and nightmares follow him into the wilderness. To stop them once and for all, he pieces clues together with flashes of the images that play endlessly inside his head – will he figure out the identity of the person who caused his nightmare before it’s too late?

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Homomisia
  • Graphic sexual assault of a child
  • Domestic abuse
  • Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
  • Substance & gambling addiction
  • Bullying
  • Homelessness

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

A Soul to Guide by Opal Reyne

All Raewyn ever wanted was to go home. After accidentally creating a portal to another realm, Raewyn finds herself trapped in a world she’s struggling to navigate. Desperate to find those with magic who can help her, she sets out on a dangerous journey to another town. Unfortunately, on her travels, she learns there are bigger and scarier monsters than the Demons she knows of – and one of them won’t let her get away. All Merikh ever wanted was to escape. For a hundred and eighty years, Merikh has been hunting for a way off Earth. He doesn’t care who he has to eat, kill, or maim to get what he wants. So, when his prey ends… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Depression
  • Bullying recounted

Dangerous by Shannon Hale

Maisie ‘Danger’ Brown needs excitement. When she wins a harmless-sounding competition to go to astronaut boot camp, that’s exactly what she gets . . . But she never imagined it would feature stumbling into a terrifying plot that kills her friends and might just kill her too. Now there’s no going back. Maisie has to live by her middle name if she wants to survive – and she’ll need to be equally courageous to untangle the romance in her life too. 

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Ableist language & slurs
  • Death of a friend
  • Torture
  • Drowning
  • Bullying

The Other Side of Perfect by Mariko Turk

Alina Keeler was destined to dance, but then a terrifying fall shatters her leg and her dreams of a professional ballet career along with it. After a summer healing (translation: eating vast amounts of Cool Ranch Doritos and bingeing ballet videos on YouTube), she is forced to trade her pre-professional dance classes for normal high school, where she reluctantly joins the school musical. However, rehearsals offer more than she expected — namely Jude, her annoyingly attractive cast-mate she just might be falling for…. Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Parental abandonment discussed
  • Nightmares & sleep difficulty
  • Chronic leg injury (theme)
  • Medical treatment, rehabilitation & surgery for a severely broken leg discussed
  • Bullying

Master Class by Christina Dalcher

Every child’s potential is regularly determined by a standardized measurement: their quotient (Q). Score high enough, and attend a top tier school with a golden future. Score too low, and it’s off to a federal boarding school with limited prospects afterwards. The purpose? An improved society where education costs drop, teachers focus on the more promising students, and parents are happy. Elena Fairchild is a teacher at one of the state’s elite schools. When her nine-year-old daughter bombs a monthly test and her Q score drops to a disastrously low level, she is immedia… Read more,

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Misogyny
  • Homomisia
  • Ableism
  • Child abuse
  • Domestic violence
  • Abortion
  • Eugenices
  • The Holocaust mentioned
  • Bullying

On the Same Page by Penelope Janu

By day Miles Franklin, named after the famous author, is a successful lawyer. By night, in secret, she writes historical romance novels under the pen name Emma Browning. When ‘Emma’s’ novels win one of Australia’s biggest literary awards, Miles’s perfectly ordered life begins to unthread at the bindings. Especially when Lars Kristensen, CEO of the publishing company contracted to publish the prize-winning books, insists on meeting the author. Besides mutual antipathy and sexual attraction, socially anxious Miles and supremely confident Lars have nothing in common. Nothing. But the more time they spend together, the… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Anxiety
  • Bullying recounted

Nightfall by Penelope Douglas

What happens when it’s five against one and nowhere to run? They call it Blackchurch. A secluded mansion in a remote, undisclosed location where the wealthy and powerful send their misbehaving sons to cool off away from prying eyes. Will Grayson has always been an animal, though. Reckless, wild, and someone who was never bound by a single rule other than to do exactly what he wanted. There was no way his grandfather was going risk him humiliating the family again. Not that the last time was entirely his fault. He might’ve enjoyed backing me into corners in high school when no one was looking, so they wouldn’t catch on… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Physical & verbal sibling abuse
  • Murder
  • Bullying