Tag Archives: Emotional Abuse & Gaslighting

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

A Winter in New York by Josie Silver

When Iris decides to move to New York to restart her life, she realizes she underestimated how big the Big Apple really is—all the nostalgic movies set in New York she’d watched with her mom while eating their special secret-recipe gelato didn’t quite do it justice. But Bobby, Iris’s best friend, isn’t about to let her hide away. He drags her to a famous autumn street fair in Little Italy, and as they walk through the food stalls, a little family-run gelateria catches her eye—could it be the same shop that’s in an old photo of her mother’s? Curious, Iris returns the next day and meets the handsome Gio, who tells her that the shop is in danger of… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Parental abandonment
  • Intimate partner abuse including emotional abuse and confinement recounted
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Relative with memory loss from a stroke mentioned (uncle)
  • Death of a mother from cancer recounted
  • Death of a wife recounted

Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire

Welcome to the Shop Where the Lost Things Go. If you ever lost a sock, you’ll find it here. If you ever wondered about favorite toy from childhood… it’s probably sitting on a shelf in the back. And the headphones that you swore that this time you’d keep safe? You guessed it… Antoinette has lost her father. Metaphorically. He’s not in the shop, and she’ll never see him again. But when Antsy finds herself lost (literally, this time), she finds that however many doors open for her, leaving the Shop for good might not be as simple as it sounds. And stepping through those doors exacts a price.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Attempted sexual abuse of a child & grooming
  • Emotional abuse & gaslighting
  • Panic attack
  • Minor self-injury for magic
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a father recounted

Pageboy by Elliot Page

Pageboy is a ground-breaking coming-of-age memoir from the Academy Award-nominated actor Elliot Page. A generation-defining actor and one of the most famous trans advocates of our time, Elliot will now be known as an uncommon literary talent, as he shares never-before-heard details and intimate interrogations on gender, love, mental health, relationships, and Hollywood.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Graphic homomisia & slurs
  • Lesbomisia & slurs
  • Transmisia, deadnaming & misgendering
  • Coming out themes including outing
  • Sexual assault
  • Adult-minor relationship & grooming
  • Emotional child abuse
  • Eating disorder including food restriction
  • Body dysphoria discussed
  • Social anxiety & panic attacks
  • Self-harm
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Emesis
  • Top surgery
  • Stalking

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)

The Champion’s Desire by Marie Lipscomb

No longer the Lady of Blackmere, Natalie joins the champions as a squire, aiding them in their pursuit of the traitor who organized the bandit attack which cost so many lives. But when their chase ends at the Champion’s Guild, she and Brandon must keep their love a secret, or risk being cast from the order.

Against the advice of the Guild Master, Brandon insists on competing in the Midsummer Melee. Long thought to be past his best, he finds renewed strength in the arms of his lady… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Misogyny
  • Verbal abuse
  • Physical injury

Full Moon Over Freedom by Angelina M. Lopez

Gillian Armstead-Bancroft—Pride of the East Side and once-perfect bruja, wife, and mother—is going to spend her summer getting good at being bad. The first time she left Freedom, Kansas, behind, she did it by doing everything right. This time, she’ll hide from the large Mexican American family welcoming her home and work in secret to break the curse that’s erased her magical life. Only by doing it all wrong can Gillian get herself and her two children away from the ghosts of her hometown by summer’s end. Nicky Mendoza is an answer to her prayers. He was the practical solution to the problem of her virginity when they… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism and internalised racism
  • Emotional, verbal and financial intimate partner abuse, on- & off-page
  • Divorce
  • Parent with alcoholism discussed
  • Death of a relative from an overdose recounted
  • Animal attack recounted

After Hours on Milagro Street by Angelina M. Lopez

Guapo pobrecito her grandmother calls him. The “poor handsome man.” Professor Jeremiah Post, the poor handsome man, is in fact standing in the way of Alejandra “Alex” Torres turning Loretta’s, her grandmother’s bar, into a viable business. The hot brainiac who sleeps in one of the upstairs tenant rooms already has all of her Mexican American family’s admiration; she won’t let him have the bar and building she needs to resurrect her career, too. Alex blowing into town has rocked Jeremiah to his mild-mannered core, but the large, boisterous Torres clan is everything he never had. He doesn’t believe Alex has the… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Misogyny
  • Racism, on-page
  • Emotional & verbal parental abuse
  • Familial estrangement
  • Parent in recovery for alcoholism
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Abortion mentioned
  • Death of a grandfather recounted
  • Bullying recounted
  • Animal cruelty mentioned

All of Us Villains by Amanda Foody and C. L. Herman

The Blood Moon rises. The Blood Veil falls. The Tournament begins.

Every generation, at the coming of the Blood Moon, seven families in the remote city of Ilvernath each name a champion to compete in a tournament to the death.

The prize? Exclusive control over a secret wellspring of high magick, the most powerful resource in the world―one thought long depleted… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Emotional & physical abuse
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Emesis
  • Murder

Business or Pleasure by Rachel Lynn Solomon

Chandler Cohen has never felt more like the ghost in “ghostwriter” until she attends a signing for a book she wrote—and the author doesn’t even recognize her. The evening turns more promising when she meets a charming man at the bar and immediately connects with him. But when all their sexual tension culminates in a spectacularly awkward hookup, she decides this is one night better off forgotten… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Antisemitism mentioned
  • Emotional child abuse recounted
  • Anxiety
  • Panic attack, on-page
  • Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
  • Abortion recounted
  • Bullying recounted