Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire

Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire

Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire book cover

The fifth installment in Seanan McGuire’s award-winning, bestselling Wayward Children series, Come Tumbling Down picks up the threads left dangling by Every Heart a Doorway and Down Among the Sticks and Bones

When Jack left Eleanor West’s School for Wayward Children she was carrying the body of her deliciously deranged sister–whom she had recently murdered in a fit of righteous justice–back to their home on the Moors.

But death in their adopted world isn’t always as permanent as it is here, and when Jack is herself carried back into the school, it becomes clear that something has happened to her. Something terrible. Something of which only the maddest of scientists could conceive. Something only her friends are equipped to help her overcome.

Eleanor West’s “No Quests” rule is about to be broken.

Again.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)
  • Mysophobia
  • Dysphoria
  • Minor blood & gore depiction
  • Dead bodies
  • Resurrection, on-page
  • Vampirism & blood drinking mentioned
  • Medical experiments with corerced consent recounted
  • Cancer mentioned
  • Death of a girlfriend recounted
  • Death of a sister recounted
  • Death of a mentor, off-the-page
  • Murder recounted
  • Lightning storm
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Wild Women & the Blues by Denny S. Bryce

Wild Women & the Blues by Denny S. Bryce

1925: Chicago is the jazz capital of the world, and the Dreamland Café is the ritziest black-and-tan club in town. Honoree Dalcour is a sharecropper’s daughter, willing to work hard and dance every night on her way to the top. Dreamland offers a path to the good life, socializing with celebrities like Louis Armstrong and filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. But Chicago is also awash in bootleg whiskey, gambling, and gangsters. And a young woman driven by ambition might risk more than she can stand to lose.

2015: Film student Sawyer Hayes arrives at the bedside of 110-year-old Honoree Dalcour, still reeling from a devastating loss that has taken him right to the brink. Sawyer has rested all his hope on this frail but formidable woman, the only living link to the legendary Oscar Micheaux. If he’s right–if she can fill in the blanks in his research, perhaps he can complete his thesis and begin a new chapter in his life. But the links Honoree makes are not ones he’s expecting . . .

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Rape (ch 43)
  • Attempted suicide mentioned (chp 15)
  • Cancer mentioned (briefly in chp 15)
  • Emesis (chp 13)
  • Death of a parent & sibling
  • Car accident
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The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

Lo Blacklock, a journalist who writes for a travel magazine, has just been given the assignment of a lifetime: a week on a luxury cruise with only a handful of cabins. The sky is clear, the waters calm, and the veneered, select guests jovial as the exclusive cruise ship, the Aurora, begins her voyage in the picturesque North Sea.

At first, Lo’s stay is nothing but pleasant: the cabins are plush, the dinner parties are sparkling, and the guests are elegant. But as the week wears on, frigid winds whip the deck, gray skies fall, and Lo witnesses what she can only describe as a dark and terrifying nightmare: a woman being thrown overboard. The problem? All passengers remain accounted for and so, the ship sails on as if nothing has happened, despite Lo’s desperate attempts to convey that something (or someone) has gone terribly, terribly wrong. 

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Fatmisia & body shaming
  • Ableism
  • Sexual assault
  • Sexual harassment
  • Cheating mentioned
  • Anxiety & panic attacks
  • PTSD
  • Alcohol abuse
  • Emesis
  • Cancer
  • Murder
  • Drowning
  • Home invasion
  • Gun violence
  • Kidnapping & captivity
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Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz

Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz

Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel M. Moniz book cover

Set among the cities and suburbs of Florida, each story in Milk Blood Heat delves into the ordinary worlds of young girls, women, and men who find themselves confronted by extraordinary moments of violent personal reckoning. These intimate portraits of people and relationships scour and soothe and blast a light on the nature of family, faith, forgiveness, consumption, and what we may, or may not, owe one another.

A thirteen-year-old meditates on her sadness and the difference between herself and her white best friend when an unexpected tragedy occurs; a woman recovering from a miscarriage finds herself unable to let go of her daughter—whose body parts she sees throughout her daily life; a teenager resists her family’s church and is accused of courting the devil; servers at a supper club cater to the insatiable cravings of their wealthy clientele; and two estranged siblings take a road-trip with their father’s ashes and are forced to face the troubling reality of how he continues to shape them.

Wise and subversive, spiritual and seductive, Milk Blood Heat forms an ouroboros of stories that bewitch with their truth.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Cheating
  • Parental abandonment
  • Adult-minor relationship between a teacher and student
  • Paedophilia, implied
  • Parental sexual abuse, implied
  • Abortion, mentioned
  • Pregnancy
  • Terminal cancer
  • Physical assault
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Suicide
  • Strangulation
  • Death of a friend
  • Death of a child
  • Death of a father
  • Death from a fall
  • Drowning
  • Graphic near-drowning
  • Robbery
  • Cannibalism, implied
  • Hanging, mentioned
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Watch Us Rise by Renée Watson and Ellen Hagan

Watch Us Rise by Renée Watson & Ellen Hagan

Jasmine and Chelsea are sick of the way women are treated even at their progressive NYC high school, so they decide to start a Women’s Rights Club. They post everything online—poems, essays, videos of Chelsea performing her poetry, and Jasmine’s response to the racial macroaggressions she experiences—and soon they go viral. But with such positive support, the club is also targeted by online trolls. When things escalate, the principal shuts the club down. Jasmine and Chelsea will risk everything for their voices—and those of other young women—to be heard.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Ableism & ableist language
  • Fatmisia & body shaming
  • Sexism
  • Racism, including cultural appropriation & anti-Blackness
  • Sexual harassment
  • Grey-area cheating
  • Death of a parent to cancer
  • Hospital
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a father & husband
  • Bullying
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Mrs Everything by Jennifer Weiner

Mrs Everything by Jennifer Weiner

Jo and Bethie Kaufman were born into a world full of promise. Growing up in 1950s Detroit, they live in a perfect house, where their roles in the family are clearly defined. Jo is the tomboy, the bookish rebel with a passion to make the world more fair; Bethie is the pretty, feminine good girl, a would-be star who enjoys the power her beauty confers and dreams of a traditional life.

But the truth ends up looking different from what the girls imagined. Jo and Bethie survive traumas and tragedies. As their lives unfold against the background of free love and Vietnam, Woodstock and women’s lib, Bethie becomes an adventure-loving wild child who is up for anything (except settling down). Meanwhile, Jo becomes a proper young mother in Connecticut. Neither woman inhabits the world she dreams of, nor has a life that feels authentic or brings her joy. Is it too late for the women to finally stake a claim on happily ever after?

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Homomisia
  • Alcoholism mentioned
  • Recreational drug use
  • Cancer
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The One by John Marrs

The One by John Marrs

How far would you go to find The One? A simple DNA test is all it takes. Just a quick mouth swab and soon you’ll be matched with your perfect partner–the one you’re genetically made for.

That’s the promise made by Match Your DNA. A decade ago, the company announced that they had found the gene that pairs each of us with our soul mate. Since then, millions of people around the world have been matched. But the discovery has its downsides: test results have led to the breakup of countless relationships and upended the traditional ideas of dating, romance and love.

Now five very different people have received the notification that they’ve been “Matched.” They’re each about to meet their one true love. But “happily ever after” isn’t guaranteed for everyone. Because even soul mates have secrets. And some are more shocking than others… 

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Cheating
  • Suicide
  • Infertility
  • Childbirth & death during childbirth
  • Miscarriages mentioned
  • Terminal illness & cancer
  • Coma
  • Aneurysm
  • Eyeball trauma
  • Death of an infant
  • Death of a spouse
  • Murder, and attempted murder of a pregnant woman
  • Strangulation
  • Kidnapping, including the abduction of an infant
  • Stalking
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Hideous Beauty by William Hussey

Hideous Beauty by William Hussey

When Dylan and Ellis’s secret relationship is exposed on social media, Dylan is forced to come out. To Dylan’s surprise they are met with support and congratulations, and an amazing reception at their highschool dance. Perhaps people aren’t as narrow-minded as he thought?

But Dylan’s happiness is short-lived. Ellis suddenly becomes angry, withdrawn, and as they drive home from the dance, he loses control of the car, sending it plunging into Hunter’s Lake. Barely conscious, Dylan is pulled free of the wreck, while Ellis is left to drown.

Grief-stricken, Dylan vows to discover what happened to Ellis that night and piece together the last months of his boyfriend’s life – and realises just how little he knew about the boy he loved.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Coming out themes
  • Homomisia
  • Rape
  • Physical & sexual abuse
  • Recreational drug use
  • Cancer
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Car accident
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Dear Justyce by Nic Stone

Dear Justyce by Nic Stone

Shortly after teenager Quan enters a not guilty plea for the shooting death of a police officer, he is placed in a holding cell to await trial. Through a series of flashbacks and letters to Justyce, the protagonist of Dear Martin, Quan’s story unravels. From a troubled childhood and bad timing to a coerced confession and prejudiced police work, Nic Stone’s newest novel takes an unflinching look at the flawed practices and ideologies that discriminate against African American boys and minorities in the American justice system. 

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism (theme)
  • Domestic violence
  • Child abuse
  • Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
  • Anxiety & panic attacks
  • Nightmares
  • Sibling with cancer (leukemia) mentioned
  • Food scarcity
  • Police brutality & racial profiling
  • Murder
  • Gun violence
  • Poverty themes
  • Incarceration (theme)

No Exit by Taylor Adams

No Exit by Taylor Adams

No Exit by Taylor Adams book cover

Nobody said being the daughter of an army general was easy. But when her dad sends a teenage subordinate to babysit her while he’s away… That’s taking it a step too far.

Cade, as beautiful as he is deadly, watches Kori with more than just interest. He looks at her like he knows her very soul. And when he saves her from a seemingly random attack, well, that’s when things get weird.

Turns out, Kori’s dad isn’t just an army general—he’s the head of a secret government project that has invented a way to travel between parallel dimensions. Dimensions where there are infinite Koris, infinite Cades…and apparently, on every other Earth, they’re madly in love.

Falling for a soldier is the last thing on Kori’s mind. Especially when she finds herself in a deadly crossfire, and someone from another Earth is hell-bent on revenge…

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Ableist language
  • Sexist language
  • Fatmisia
  • Racist slur/s
  • Mental illness slur/s
  • Rape threats
  • Sexual assault
  • Paedophilia
  • Child sex trafficking
  • Child abuse, recounted
  • Alcoholism
  • Panic attacks, recounted
  • Nightmares
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Alcohol abuse
  • Blood and gore depiction
  • Graphic physical injury
  • Terminal cancer
  • Emesis
  • Minor grief depiction
  • Death of a parent
  • Death of a brother
  • Death of a mother
  • Death of a cousin
  • Murder and attempted murder
  • Gun violence
  • Physical assault
  • Torture
  • Kidnapping
  • Captivity
  • Psychological torture
  • Animal murder and torture, recounted
  • Death of a pet
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