Tag Archives: Grief & Loss Depiction

The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston

Sometimes, the worst day of your life happens, and you have to figure out how to live after it.

So Clementine forms a plan to keep her heart safe: stay busy, work hard, find someone decent to love, and try to remember to chase the moon. The last one is silly and obviously metaphorical, but her aunt always told her that you needed at least one big dream to keep going. And for the last year, that plan has gone off without a hitch. Mostly. The love part is hard because she doesn’t want to get too close to anyone—she isn’t sure her heart can take it… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of an aunt from suicide by an overdose recounted, off-page
  • Death of a grandparent from dementia recounted, off-page

Banyan Moon by Thao Thai

When Ann Tran gets the call that her fiercely beloved grandmother, Minh, has passed away, her life is already at a crossroads. In the years since she’s last seen Minh, Ann has built a seemingly perfect life—a beautiful lake house, a charming professor boyfriend, and invites to elegant parties that bubble over with champagne and good taste—but it all crumbles with one positive pregnancy test. With both her relationship and carefully planned future now in question, Ann returns home to Florida to face her estranged mother, Huơng… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Child & domestic abuse
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a grandmother

Family Meal by Bryan Washington

Cam is living in Los Angeles and falling apart after the love of his life has died. Kai’s ghost won’t leave Cam alone; his spectral visits wild, tender, and unexpected. When Cam returns to his hometown of Houston, he crashes back into the orbit of his former best friend, TJ, and TJ’s family bakery. TJ’s not sure how to navigate this changed Cam, impenetrably cool and self-destructing, or their charged estrangement. Can they find a way past all that has been said – and left unsaid – to save each other? Could they find a way back to being okay again, or maybe for the first time?.. Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Cheating
  • Drug use & abuse
  • Sex addiction
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a partner
  • Death of parents in a car accident recounted

Knockout by Sarah MacLean

With her headful of wild curls and wilder ideas and an unabashed love of experiments and explosives, society has labeled Lady Imogen Loveless peculiar…and doesn’t know she’s one of the Hell’s Belles—a group of vigilantes operating outside the notice of most of London

Thomas Peck is not most of London. The brilliant detective fought his way off the streets and into a promising career through sheer force of will and a keen ability to see things others miss, like the fact that Imogen isn’t peculiar… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Abortion mentioned
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a parent recounted
  • Murder mentioned
  • Explosions
  • Fire and resulting destruction of property
  • Police corruption

Monstrilio by Gerado Sámano Córdova

Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago’s lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family’s decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses—though curbed by his biological and chosen family’s communal care—threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Blood & gore depiction including body horror
  • Grief & loss depiction (theme)
  • Death of a child
  • Murder
  • Animal death

Hello Stranger by Katherine Center

Sadie Montgomery never saw what was coming . . . Literally! One minute she’s celebrating the biggest achievement of her life—placing as a finalist in the North American Portrait Society competition—the next, she’s lying in a hospital bed diagnosed with a “probably temporary” condition known as face blindness. She can see, but every face she looks at is now a jumbled puzzle of disconnected features. Imagine trying to read a book upside down and in another language. This is Sadie’s new reality with every face she sees… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Sibling abuse recounted*
  • Cheating recounted
  • Prosopagnosia
  • Brain surgery & recovery
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a parent recounted

*Context: Discussions of the toxic relationship and harassment from a stepsibling including being bullied and being kicked out of school, and being framed for cheating, stealing, and tormenting a classmate resulting in attempted suicide.

Maame by Jessica George

It’s fair to say that Maddie’s life in London is far from rewarding. With a mother who spends most of her time in Ghana (yet still somehow manages to be overbearing), Maddie is the primary caretaker for her father, who suffers from advanced stage Parkinson’s. At work, her boss is a nightmare and Maddie is tired of always being the only Black person in every meeting.

When her mum returns from her latest trip to Ghana, Maddie leaps at the chance to get out of the family home and finally start living… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Panic attacks
  • Parkison’s Disease
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a parent

Friends Like These by Jennifer Lynn Alvarez

Tegan Sheffield’s annual end-of-summer beach party is the only way to start their senior year. At least that’s what Jake Healy tells his girlfriend Jessica Sanchez.

But when a video prank from the party goes viral and a body is discovered at the beach, Jake and Jessica find themselves at the centre of a national media storm and a police investigation.

It’s a race to uncover the truth before the killer strikes again… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Date rape
  • Sexual assault
  • Revenge pornography of a minor
  • Abusive relationship
  • Toxic friendship
  • Panic attack
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Drug use mentioned
  • Physical injury (minor)
  • Emesis mentioned
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Disappearance (theme)
  • Physical assault

Lose You to Find Me by Erik J. Brown

Tommy Dees is in the weeds — restaurant speak for beyond overwhelmed. He’s been working as a server at Sunset Estates retirement community to get the experience he needs to attend one of the best culinary schools in the world. And to make his application shine, he also needs a letter of recommendation from his sadistic manager. But in exchange for the letter, Tommy has to meet three conditions—including training the new hire… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Homomisia discussed
  • Outing
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Hospitalisation for serious injury
  • Cyberbullying

The Murders of Molly Southbourne by Tade Thompson

The rule is simple: don’t bleed.

For as long as Molly Southbourne can remember, she’s been watching herself die. Whenever she bleeds, another molly is born, identical to her in every way and intent on her destruction.

Molly knows every way to kill herself, but she also knows that as long as she survives she’ll be hunted. No matter how well she follows the rules, eventually the mollys will find her. Can Molly find a way to stop the tide of blood, or will she meet her end at the hand of a girl who looks just like her?.. Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Incest*
  • Necrophilia mentioned
  • Delusions, including a diagnosis of Capgras Syndrome
  • Suicide & suicidal ideation
  • Self-harm including cutting and self-inflicted wounds
  • Graphic blood & gore depiction (theme)
  • Body horror
  • Medical procedures including autopsies
  • Dismemberment
  • Hospital
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a mother and father, off-page
  • Death of a child
  • Murder & attempted murder
  • Strangulation
  • Gun violence
  • Graphic knife violence & stabbing
  • Graphic physical assault
  • Captivity
  • Fire
  • Death of a pet dog
  • Animal death & dead bodies including butchery

Context: a) there is a scene where the protagonist is interrupted having sex with her boyfriend by her doppelgänger and they let her join in and b) it is mentioned that the protagonist’s father caught her touching her doppelgänger’s genitals when she was a kid.