Tag Archives: Death of a Child

The Lighthouse Witches by CJ Cooke

When single mother Liv is commissioned to paint a mural in a 100-year-old lighthouse on a remote Scottish island, it’s an opportunity to start over with her three daughters–Luna, Sapphire, and Clover. When two of her daughters go missing, she’s frantic. She learns that the cave beneath the lighthouse was once a prison for women accused of witchcraft. The locals warn her about wildlings, supernatural beings who mimic human children, created by witches for revenge. Liv is told wildlings are dangerous and must be killed. Twenty-two years later, Luna has been searching for… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Cancer
  • Murder of a child

The First Day of Spring by Nancy Tucker

Chrissie is eight and she has a secret: she has just killed a boy. The feeling made her belly fizz like soda pop. Her playmates are tearful and their mothers are terrified, keeping them locked indoors. But Chrissie rules the roost — she’s the best at wall-walking, she knows how to get free candy, and now she has a feeling of power that she never gets at home, where food is scarce and attention scarcer. Twenty years later, adult Chrissie is living in hiding under a changed name. A single mother, all she wants is for her daughter to have the childhood she herself was denied. That’s why the threatening phone calls are so terrifying. People are… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Emotional child abuse & neglect
  • Domestic abuse
  • Hospitalisation
  • Emesis
  • Murder
  • Poisoning
  • Death of a child
  • Incarceration

Seven Devils by L. R. Lam and Elizabeth May

When Eris faked her death, she thought she had left her old life as the heir to the galaxy’s most ruthless empire behind. But her recruitment by the Novantaen Resistance, an organization opposed to the empire’s voracious expansion, throws her right back into the fray.

Eris has been assigned a new mission: to infiltrate a spaceship ferrying deadly cargo and return the intelligence gathered to the Resistance. But her partner for the mission, mechanic and hotshot pilot Cloelia, bears an old grudge against Eris… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Misogyny
  • Forced sex work recounted
  • Emotional & physical abuse
  • Death of a child
  • Dismemberment & loss of limb
  • Surgery
  • Death of a parent
  • Torture mentioned
  • Kidnapping
  • Loss of autonomy (mind control)

Of Wicked Blood by Olivia Wildenstein and Katie Hayoz

I didn’t mean to steal the Bloodstone from the De Morel’s crypt.
Scratch that, I did mean to steal it.
Until I realized it was a curse-magnet that only comes off if I, along with a jolly trio, successfully defeat four curses.
If any of us fail, I’m dead.
I’ve never been a glass half-empty sort of person, but my glass looks in dire need of a refill right about now.
The only highlight of this wicked treasure hunt: feisty, entitled Cadence de Morel… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Ableism
  • Child abuse recounted
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Recreational drug use
  • Death of a child
  • Death of a parent recounted
  • Grave robbing & desecration

Good Bad Girl by Alice Feeney

Twenty years after a baby is stolen from a stroller, a woman is murdered in a care home. The two crimes are somehow linked, and a good bad girl may be the key to discovering the truth.

Edith may have been tricked into a nursing home, but at eighty-years-young, she’s planning her escape. Patience works there, cleaning messes and bonding with Edith, a kindred spirit. But Patience is lying to Edith about almost everything… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Child abuse
  • Postpartum depression
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Emesis
  • Death of a child
  • Murder
  • Kidnapping of a child
  • Physical assault
  • Animal cruelty

The Fever King by Victoria Lee

In the former United States, sixteen-year-old Noam Álvaro wakes up in a hospital bed, the sole survivor of the viral magic that killed his family and made him a technopath. His ability to control technology attracts the attention of the minister of defense and thrusts him into the magical elite of the nation of Carolinia.

The son of undocumented immigrants, Noam has spent his life fighting for the rights of refugees fleeing magical outbreaks—refugees Carolinia routinely deports with vicious efficiency. Sensing a way to make change, Noam accepts the minister’s offer… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Slut shaming
  • Child sexual abuse
  • Statutory rape
  • Physical abuse
  • Suicide, off-page
  • Alcohol abuse
  • Drug abuse
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Murder
  • Death of a child
  • Death of a parent

The Beauty in Breaking by Michele Harper

Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Brought up in Washington, DC, in an abusive family, she went to Harvard, where she met her husband. They stayed together through medical school until two months before she was scheduled to join the staff of a hospital in central Philadelphia, when he told her he couldn’t move with her. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Child Abuse
  • Domestic abuse
  • Alcoholism
  • Abortion
  • Cancer
  • Death of a child

The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei

They left Earth to save humanity. They’ll have to save themselves first. It is the eve of Earth’s environmental collapse. A single ship carries humanity’s last hope: eighty elite graduates of a competitive program, who will give birth to a generation of children in deep space. But halfway to a distant but livable planet, a lethal bomb kills three of the crew and knocks The Phoenix off course. Asuka, the only surviving witness, is an immediate suspect. Asuka already felt like an impostor before the explosion. She was the last picked for the mission, she struggled during training back on Earth, and she was chosen to represent Japan…. Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Miscarriage & fertility issues
  • Death of a child
  • Terrorism

Mister Magic by Kiersten White

Thirty years after a tragic accident shut down production of the classic children’s program Mister Magic, the five surviving cast members have done their best to move on. But just as generations of cultishly devoted fans still cling to the lessons they learned from the show, the cast, known as the Circle of Friends, have spent their lives searching for the happiness they felt while they were on it. The friendship. The feeling of belonging. And the protection of Mister Magic. But with no surviving video of the show, no evidence of who directed or produced it, and no records of who—or what—the beloved host actually was, memories… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Homomisia
  • Child abuse
  • Conversion therapy mentioned
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Body horror
  • Death of a child
  • Kidnapping

Nestlings by Nat Cassidy

Ana and Reid needed a lucky break. The horrifically complicated birth of their first child has left Ana paralyzed, bitter, and struggling: with mobility, with her relationship with Reid, with resentment for her baby. That’s about to change with the words any New Yorker would love to hear―affordable housing lottery. They’ve won an apartment in the Deptford, one of Manhattan’s most revered buildings with beautiful vistas of Central Park and stunning architecture. Reid dismisses disturbing events and Ana’s deep unease and paranoia as the price of living in New York―people are odd―but he can’t explain the needle-like bite marks on the baby.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Ableism
  • Racism
  • Sexism
  • Antisemitism
  • Homomisic slurs
  • Gaslighting
  • Post-partum depression
  • Claustrophobia
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Death of a parent
  • Infanticide mentioned
  • COVID-19 pandemic