Aurora Burning by Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff

Aurora Burning by Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff

Aurora Burning by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff book cover

First, the bad news: an ancient evil—you know, your standard consume-all-life-in-the-galaxy deal—is about to be unleashed. The good news? Squad 312 is standing by to save the day. They’ve just got to take care of a few small distractions first.

Like the clan of gremps who’d like to rearrange their favorite faces.

And the cadre of illegit GIA agents with creepy flowers where their eyes used to be, who’ll stop at nothing to get their hands on Auri.

Then there’s Kal’s long-lost sister, who’s not exactly happy to see her baby brother, and has a Syldrathi army at her back. With half the known galaxy on their tails, Squad 312 has never felt so wanted.

When they learn the Hadfield has been found, it’s time to come out of hiding. Two centuries ago, the colony ship vanished, leaving Auri as its sole survivor. Now, its black box might be what saves them. But time is short, and if Auri can’t learn to master her powers as a Trigger, the squad and all their admirers are going to be deader than the Great Ultrasaur of Abraaxis IV.

Shocking revelations, bank heists, mysterious gifts, inappropriately tight bodysuits, and an epic firefight will determine the fate of the Aurora Legion’s most unforgettable heroes—and maybe the rest of the galaxy as well.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Ableist slurs
  • Blood depiction
  • Death of a friend recounted
  • Death of a parent recounted
  • Explosions
  • Torture
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The Mary Shelley Club by Goldy Moldavsky

The Mary Shelley Club by Goldy Moldavsky

Also known as The Last Girl.

New girl Rachel Chavez is eager to make a fresh start at Manchester Prep. But as one of the few scholarship kids, Rachel struggles to fit in, and when she gets caught up in a prank gone awry, she ends up with more enemies than friends.

To her surprise, however, the prank attracts the attention of the Mary Shelley Club, a secret club of students with one objective: come up with the scariest prank to orchestrate real fear. But as the pranks escalate, the competition turns cutthroat and takes on a life of its own.

When the tables are turned and someone targets the club itself, Rachel must track down the real-life monster in their midst . . . even if it means finally confronting the dark secrets from her past.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Emotional abuse & gaslighting
  • Coulrophobia
  • Panic attacks
  • Nightmares
  • Suicide discussed
  • Nonconsensual drugging
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Physical injury, including scarring
  • Hospitalisation
  • Death of a friend
  • Death from a fall
  • Murder & attempted murder
  • Knife violence
  • Home invasion
  • Stalking
  • Kidnapping & captivity
  • Bullying
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Every Last Word by Tamara Ireland Stone

Every Last Word by Tamara Ireland Stone

Samantha McAllister looks just like the rest of the popular girls in her junior class. But hidden beneath the straightened hair and expertly applied makeup is a secret that her friends would never understand: Sam has Purely-Obsessional OCD and is consumed by a stream of dark thoughts and worries that she can’t turn off. Second-guessing every move, thought, and word makes daily life a struggle, and it doesn’t help that her lifelong friends will turn toxic at the first sign of a wrong outfit, wrong lunch, or wrong crush. Yet Sam knows she’d be truly crazy to leave the protect… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Ableism, internalised ableism & ableist language
  • Pure O OCD & intrusive thoughts (theme)
  • Panic attacks, on-page
  • Hallucinations & psychosis
  • Depression (sc)
  • Suicide by drug overdose recounted, off-page
  • Hospital mentioned
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a friend, off-page
  • Death of a mother from terminal cancer mentioned
  • Prescription drug use mentioned
  • Bullying
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Jane Doe by Victoria Helen Stone

Jane Doe by Victoria Helen Stone

Jane’s days at a insurance company are perfectly ordinary. She blends in well, unremarkably pretty & extra efficient at her low-level job. She’s just the kind of woman middle manager Steven Hepsworth likes—meek, insecure, and willing to defer to a man. No one has any idea who Jane really is. Least of all Steven. But plain Jane is hiding something. And Steven’s bringing out the worst in her. Nothing can distract Jane from going straight for his heart: allowing herself to be seduced into Steven’s bed, to insinuate herself into his career and his family, and to expose all his dirty… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Abusive relationship
  • Suicide
  • Cheating
  • Death of a best friend
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Gap Year in Ghost Town by Michael Pryor

Gap Year in Ghost Town by Michael Pryor

Gap Year in Ghost Town by Michael Pryor book cover

Let’s get this straight – ghosts are everywhere. I can see them. You can’t. And, see them or not, they’re dangerous. This is why my family has hunted ghosts for hundreds of years to protect people like you.

The Marin family are outcasts of the ghost hunting world. They run a two-man operation in inner city Melbourne. Anton has the Ghost-sight, but his father does not.

Rani Cross is supremely skilled in hand-to-hand combat, with enhanced speed and strength thanks to her magical initiation into the Company of the Righteous.

When it comes to ghost-hunting methodology, Anton and Rani don’t see eye to eye – Anton likes to ‘ease their passage’ to the next world, while Rani’s all about the slashing.

But Melbourne is under threat; with a massive spike in violent ghost manifestations, Anton and Rani must find a way to work together to keep supernatural forces at bay.

And what with all the blindingly terrifying brushes with death, Anton must decide if he really wants in on the whole ghost hunting biz anyway.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Parental abandonment
  • Death of a friend
  • Death of a child
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The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley

The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley

The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley book cover

In 1859, ex-East India Company smuggler Merrick Tremayne is trapped at home in Cornwall after sustaining an injury that almost cost him his leg and something is wrong; a statue moves, his grandfather’s pines explode, and his brother accuses him of madness.

When the India Office recruits Merrick for an expedition to fetch quinine—essential for the treatment of malaria—from deep within Peru, he knows it’s a terrible idea. Nearly every able-bodied expeditionary who’s made the attempt has died, and he can barely walk. But Merrick is desperate to escape everything at home, so he sets off, against his better judgment, for a tiny mission colony on the edge of the Amazon where a salt line on the ground separates town from forest. Anyone who crosses is killed by something that watches from the trees, but somewhere beyond the salt are the quinine woods, and the way around is blocked.

Surrounded by local stories of lost time, cursed woods, and living rock, Merrick must separate truth from fairytale and find out what befell the last expeditions; why the villagers are forbidden to go into the forest; and what is happening to Raphael, the young priest who seems to have known Merrick’s grandfather, who visited Peru many decades before. The Bedlam Stacks is the story of a profound friendship that grows in a place that seems just this side of magical.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Ableist language
  • Racial slur
  • Miscarriage
  • Death of a friend
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The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil’s name. Some cops… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Physical child abuse & domestic abuse mentioned
  • Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) & nightmares
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Recreational drug use mentioned
  • Teen pregnancy recounted
  • Death of a friend & child (on-page & recounted)
  • Murder
  • Gun violence
  • Gang violence
  • Incarceration recounted
  • Police brutality & violence, including the fatal shooting of an unarmed Black teen

Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas

Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas

Catherine House is a school of higher learning like no other. Hidden deep in the woods of rural Pennsylvania, this crucible of reformist liberal arts study with its experimental curriculum, wildly selective admissions policy, and formidable endowment, has produced some of the world’s best minds. For those lucky few selected, tuition, room, and board are free. But acceptance comes with a price. Students are required to give the House three years—summers included—completely removed from the outside world. Family, friends… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Slut shaming
  • Suicide
  • Alcohol consumption & abuse
  • Emesis
  • Medical examination
  • Human & animal medical experimentation
  • Needles
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a sister mentioned
  • Death of a best friend & classmate
  • Captivity & forced isolation
  • Animal injury & illness
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Toil & Trouble: 15 Tales of Women & Witchcraft edited by Tess Sharpe & Jessica Spotswood

Toil & Trouble: 15 Tales of Women & Witchcraft edited by Tess Sharpe & Jessica Spotswood

Toil and Trouble: 15 Tales of Women and Witchcraft by Jessica Spotswood and Tess Sharpe book cover

A young adult fiction anthology of 15 stories featuring contemporary, historical, and futuristic stories featuring witchy heroines who are diverse in race, class, sexuality, religion, geography, and era.

From good witches to bad witches, to witches who are a bit of both, this is an anthology of diverse witchy tales from a collection of diverse, feminist authors. The collective strength of women working together—magically or mundanely–has long frightened society, to the point that women’s rights are challenged, legislated against, and denied all over the world. Toil & Trouble delves deep into the truly diverse mythology of witchcraft from many cultures and feminist points of view, to create modern and unique tales of witchery that have yet to be explored.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism
  • Rape
  • Sexual assault
  • Abusive relationship
  • Substance addiction
  • Panic attacks
  • Drug use recounted
  • Alcohol consumption recounted
  • Childbirth
  • Dead bodies
  • Hospitalisation recounted
  • Death of an aunt
  • Death of a parent
  • Death of a friend
  • Fire
  • Bullying
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Nowhere Near You by Leah Thomas

Nowhere Near You by Leah Thomas

Ollie and Moritz might never meet, but their friendship knows no bounds. Their letters carry on as Ollie embarks on his first road trip away from the woods–no easy feat for a boy allergic to electricity–and Moritz decides which new school would best suit an eyeless boy who prefers to be alone.

Along the way they meet other teens like them, other products of strange science who lead seemingly normal lives in ways Ollie and Moritz never imagined possible: A boy who jokes about his atypical skeleton; an aspiring actress who hides a strange deformity; a track star whose abnormal heart propels her to victory. Suddenly the future feels wide open for two former hermits. But even as Ollie and Moritz dare to enjoy life, they can’t escape their past, which threatens to destroy any progress they’ve made. Can these boys ever find their place in a world that might never understand them?

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Attempted rape
  • Forced drug use
  • Terminal cancer
  • Death of a mother
  • Death of a friend
  • Drowning mentioned
  • Bus accident
  • Bullying mentioned