The Year of the Crocodile by Courtney Milan

The Year of the Crocodile by Courtney Milan

Tina Chen and Blake Reynolds have been together for almost a year. In that time, they’ve grown closer on just about every front. The one exception? Blake’s father has never let anything stop him. Tina’s parents have never let anyone push them around. And they’ve never met.

That’s about to change. But don’t worry—fireworks are traditional at Chinese New Years.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Religious persecution & refugee experiences
  • Chinese education camps
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Eating disorder recovery
  • Substance addiction recovery
  • Heart attack recounted

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

Fired Up about Reproductive Rights by Jane Kirby 

Fired Up about Reproductive Rights by Jane Kirby

What is at stake in the fight for safe, legal, and accessible abortion services? And who benefits from our dark legacy of coercive sterilization, eugenics, and population control? Reproductive rights are rights that everyone should be fired up about!

Decades after abortion was legalized and decriminalized in Canada, the US, and the UK, why are we still fighting for reproductive rights?

Shattering the myth that the battle for reproductive rights has already been won, Fired Up about Reproductive Rights shows us the many ways our reproductive lives remain subject to state control… Read more.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Misogyny
  • Forced sterilisation
  • Restrictions of bodily autonomy
  • Mentions of residential schools

Cape by Kate Hannigan 

Cape by Kate Hannigan and illustrated by Patrick Spaziante

Josie O’Malley does a lot to help out Mam after her father goes off to fight the Nazis, but she wishes she could do more—like all those caped heroes who now seem to have disappeared. If Josie can’t fly and control weather like her idol, Zenobia, maybe she can put her math smarts to use cracking puzzles for the government.

After an official tosses out her puzzler test because she’s a girl, it soon becomes clear that an even more top-secret agency has its eye on Josie, along with two other applicants: Akiko and Mae. The trio bonds over their shared love of female superhero celebrities, from Fantomah to Zenobia to the Black Cat. But during one extraordinary afternoon, they find themselves transformed… Read more.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Misogyny
  • Racism
  • Death of father mentioned
  • Fire
  • Bullying
  • Japanese internment camps
  • World War Two

They Called Us Enemy by George Takei

They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott, and illustrated by Harmony Becker

George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his captivating stage presence and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father’s — and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future.

In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten “relocation centers,” hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard… Read more.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism
  • Concentration camps
  • World War Two

Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly

Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly

New York socialite Caroline Ferriday has her hands full with her post at the French consulate and a new love on the horizon. But Caroline’s world is forever changed when Hitler’s army invades Poland in September 1939—and then sets its sights on France.
 
An ocean away from Caroline, Kasia Kuzmerick, a Polish teenager, senses her carefree youth disappearing as she is drawn deeper into her role as a courier for the underground resistance movement. In a tense atmosphere of watchful eyes and suspecting neighbours, one false move can have dire consequences… Read more.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Antisemitism
  • Rape
  • Sexual assault
  • Forced incest
  • Child abuse
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Attempted suicide
  • Self harm mentioned
  • Starvation
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Medical experimentation
  • Eugenics
  • Explosion & bombings
  • Gun violence
  • Whipping
  • Genocide
  • World War Two
  • Concentration & labour camps
  • Death by animal attack

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says good-bye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France…but invade they do, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When a German captain requisitions Vianne’s home, she and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates all around them, she is forced to make one impossible choice after another to keep her family alive.

Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians… Read more.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • PhysicaAntisemitism
  • Rape
  • Pregnancy from rape
  • Miscarriage mentioned
  • Blood depiction
  • Serious physical injury of a sibling
  • Cancer
  • Death of a parent recounted
  • Death of a child
  • Death of a friend
  • Death of a sibling
  • Murder
  • Torture
  • Gun violence
  • Concentration camps
  • War themes
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The Serpent’s Curse by Tony Abbott

The Serpent’s Curse by Tony Abbott

Wade, Lily, Darrell, and Becca may have found the Copernicus Legacy’s first relic—a beautiful blue stone named after the constellation Vela—but they have lost much more than they have gained. Darrell’s mother, Sara, has been kidnapped by Galina Krause, the conniving leader of the Teutonic Order, who hopes that the renowned academic will lead her and her minions to the next relic.

That means the stakes couldn’t be higher for the Kaplan kids, who trek across the cold wilderness of Siberia, along the winding canals of Venice, and through the streets of Moscow’s Red Square in search of their beloved family member and the sought-after relic called the Serpens… Read more.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Drugging
  • Medical experimentation mentioned
  • Beheading mentioned
  • Death of an uncle recounted
  • Murder
  • Gun violence
  • Stabbing
  • Explosion
  • Poisoning
  • Car accident
  • Kidnapping
  • Fire
  • Mass death in Siberian labour camps mentioned
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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer

January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she’s never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb…

As Juliet and her new correspondent exchange letters, Juliet is drawn into the world of this man and his friends—and what a wonderfully eccentric world it is. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society—born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi when its members were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island… Read more.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Antisemitism & Nazism
  • Concentration camps
  • Genocide
  • Emesis
  • Death of a parent
  • Torture
  • War themes
  • Animal death
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These Hollow Vows by Lexi Ryan

Brie hates the Fae and refuses to have anything to do with them, even if that means starving on the street. But when her sister is sold to the sadistic king of the Unseelie court to pay a debt, she’ll do whatever it takes to get her back—including making a deal with the king himself to steal three magical relics from the Seelie court. Caught between two dangerous courts, Brie must decide who to trust with her loyalty. And with her heart. 

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Parental abandonment
  • Forced sex work mentioned
  • Nonconsensual drugging
  • Blood depiction
  • Death of a mother & father
  • Murder mentioned
  • Kidnapping
  • Blackmail
  • Fire & house fire
  • Animal attack
  • Labour camps
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