The Color Purple by Alice Walker

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her father and attempting to protect her sister from the same fate, and continuing over the course of her marriage to Mister, a brutal man who terrorizes her. Celie eventually learns that her abusive husband has been keeping her sister’s letters from her and the rage she feels, combined with an example of love and independence provided by her close friend Shug, pushes her finally toward an awakening of her creative and loving self.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism & racial slurs
  • Cultural appropriation, specifically Native American culture
  • Domestic violence
  • Physical, verbal & emotional abuse, including gaslighting
  • Rape, statutory rape & rape of a child
  • Incest (father-daughter)
  • Pregnancy, result of rape & incest
  • Forced estrangement
  • Cheating
  • Self-harm
  • Disordered eating (bingeing)
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Female genital mutilation mentioned
  • Emesis
  • Lynching recounted
  • Murder
  • Gun violence mentioned
  • Death of a mother
  • Death of an infant

A Mad, Wicked Folly by Sharon Biggs Waller

A Mad, Wicked Folly by Sharon Biggs Waller

Welcome to the world of the fabulously wealthy in London, 1909, where dresses and houses are overwhelmingly opulent, social class means everything, and women are taught to be nothing more than wives and mothers. Into this world comes seventeen-year-old Victoria Darling, who wants only to be an artist—a nearly impossible dream for a girl.

After Vicky poses nude for her illicit art class, she is expelled from her French finishing school. Shamed and scandalized, her parents try to marry her off to the wealthy Edmund Carrick-Humphrey. But Vicky has other things on her mind: her clandestine application to the Royal College of Art; her participation in the suffragette movement; and her growing attraction to a working-class boy. As the world of debutante balls, corsets, and high society obligations closes in around her, Vicky is torn. Just how much is she willing to sacrifice to pursue her dreams?

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Classism
  • Misogyny
  • Arranged marriage
  • Cheating
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To Love and to Loathe by Martha Waters

To Love & to Loathe by Martha Waters

The widowed Diana, Lady Templeton and Jeremy, Marquess of Willingham are infamous among English high society as much for their sharp-tongued bickering as their flirtation. One evening, an argument at a ball turns into a serious wager: Jeremy will marry within the year or Diana will forfeit one hundred pounds. So shortly after, just before a fortnight-long house party at Elderwild, Jeremy’s country estate, Diana is shocked when Jeremy appears at her home with a very different kind of proposition.

After his latest mistress unfavorably criticized his skills in the bedroom, Jeremy is looking for reassurance, so he has gone to the only woman he trusts to be totally truthful. He suggests that they embark on a brief affair while at the house party—Jeremy can receive an honest critique of his bedroom skills and widowed Diana can use the gossip to signal to other gentlemen that she is interested in taking a lover.

Diana thinks taking him up on his counter-proposal can only help her win her wager. With her in the bedroom and Jeremy’s marriage-minded grandmother, the formidable Dowager Marchioness of Willingham, helping to find suitable matches among the eligible ladies at Elderwild, Diana is confident her victory is assured. But while they’re focused on winning wagers, they stand to lose their own hearts.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Cheating mentioned
  • Gambling addiction mentioned
  • Death of a sibling recounted
  • Death of a husband recounted
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Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Malibu: August 1983. It’s the day of Nina Riva’s annual end-of-summer party, and anticipation is at a fever pitch. Everyone wants to be around the famous Rivas; the siblings are a source of fascination in Malibu and the world over–especially as the offspring of the legendary singer Mick Riva.

The only person not looking forward to the party of the year is Nina herself, who never wanted to be the center of attention, and who has also just been very publicly abandoned by her pro tennis player husband. Oh, and maybe Hud–because it is long past time for him to confess something to the brother from whom he’s been inseparable since birth. Jay, on the other hand, is counting the minutes until nightfall, when the girl he can’t stop thinking about promised she’ll be there. And Kit has a couple secrets of her own–including a guest she invited without consulting anyone.

By midnight the party will be completely out of control. By morning, the Riva mansion will have gone up in flames. But before that first spark in the early hours before dawn, the alcohol will flow, the music will play, and the loves and secrets that shaped this family’s generations will all come bubbling to the surface.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Sexual harassment
  • Parental abandonment
  • Cheating
  • Alcoholism & recreational drug use
  • Dieting
  • Abortion & miscarriage
  • Death of a parent
  • Stroke
  • Drowning
  • Fire
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The Lying Game by Ruth Ware

The Lying Game by Ruth Ware

Isa drops everything, takes her baby daughter and heads straight to Salten. She spent the most significant days of her life at boarding school on the marshes there, days which still cast their shadow over her now.

Something terrible has been found on the beach. Something which will force Isa to confront her past, together with the three best friends she hasn’t seen for years, but has never forgotten. Theirs is no cosy reunion: Salten isn’t a safe place for them, after what they did.

At school the girls used to play the Lying Game. They competed to convince people of the most outrageous stories. But for some, did the boundary between fact and fantasy become too blurred?

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Cheating
  • Alcohol abuse
  • Recreational drug abuse
  • Death of a parent
  • Death of a friend
  • Animal death
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The Death of Mrs Westaway by Ruth Ware

The Death of Mrs Westaway by Ruth Ware

On a day that begins like any other, Hal receives a mysterious letter bequeathing her a substantial inheritance. She realizes very quickly that the letter was sent to the wrong person—but also that the cold-reading skills she’s honed as a tarot card reader might help her claim the money.

Soon, Hal finds herself at the funeral of the deceased…where it dawns on her that there is something very, very wrong about this strange situation and the inheritance at the centre of it.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Homomisia
  • Sex work discussed
  • Child abuse recounted
  • Disownment & familial estrangement
  • Cheating
  • Anxiety & panic attacks
  • PTSD
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Alcohol abuse recounted
  • Dubious consent to medication
  • Teen pregnancy
  • Miscarriage & abortion mentioned
  • Infertility mentioned
  • Emesis
  • Hospital
  • Minor blood & gore depiction and physical injuries
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a mother & father
  • Death of a grandmother
  • Death of a sister
  • Murder & attempted murder
  • Strangulation
  • Car accident
  • Disappearance of a loved one
  • Blackmail
  • Captivity recounted
  • Poverty themes & eviction
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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. 

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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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When No One Is Watching by Alyssa Cole

When No One Is Watching by Alyssa Cole

When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole book cover

Sydney Green is Brooklyn born and raised, but her beloved neighborhood seems to change every time she blinks. Condos are sprouting like weeds, FOR SALE signs are popping up overnight, and the neighbors she’s known all her life are disappearing. To hold onto her community’s past and present, Sydney channels her frustration into a walking tour and finds an unlikely and unwanted assistant in one of the new arrivals to the block—her neighbor Theo.

But Sydney and Theo’s deep dive into history quickly becomes a dizzying descent into paranoia and fear. Their neighbors may not have moved to the suburbs after all, and the push to revitalize the community may be more deadly than advertised.

When does coincidence become conspiracy? Where do people go when gentrification pushes them out? Can Sydney and Theo trust each other—or themselves—long enough to find out before they too disappear?

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism, including aversive racism
  • Gentrification
  • Attempted genocide
  • Racial profiling
  • Cheating
  • Alcohol abuse
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Drug use, mentioned
  • Death of a friend
  • Death of a mother
  • Grief depiction
  • Arrest and incarceration, mentioned
  • Dead body, on page
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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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Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley

Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley

Firekeeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley book cover

As a biracial, unenrolled tribal member and the product of a scandal, eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine has never quite fit in, both in her hometown and on the nearby Ojibwe reservation. Daunis dreams of studying medicine, but when her family is struck by tragedy, she puts her future on hold to care for her fragile mother.

The only bright spot is meeting Jamie, the charming new recruit on her brother Levi’s hockey team. Yet even as Daunis falls for Jamie, certain details… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Ableism
  • Misogyny
  • Fatmisia
  • Racism & racial slurs
  • Sexual harassment
  • Sexual assault, on-page
  • Rape, on-page
  • Cheating recounted
  • Child abuse & neglect mentioned
  • Substance addiction discussed
  • Nightmares
  • Suicide by a gunshot to the head, on-page
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Drug use & abuse (theme)
  • Overdose mentioned
  • Teen pregnancy recounted
  • Grandparent recovering from a stroke
  • Physical injuries, including nerve damage & chronic shoulder injury
  • Hospitalisation for internalised bleeding & liver damage
  • Surgery mentioned
  • Emesis
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of an uncle
  • Death of a father
  • Murder of a friend & teenager by gun violence, on-page
  • Car accident, on- & off-page
  • Bullying
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