The Initial Insult by Mindy McGinnis

The Initial Insult by Mindy McGinnis

The Initial Insult by Mindy McGinnis book cover

Tress Montor knows that her family used to mean something—until she didn’t have a family anymore. When her parents disappeared seven years ago while driving her best friend home, Tress lost everything. She might still be a Montor, but the entire town shuns her now that she lives with her drunken, one-eyed grandfather at what locals refer to as the “White Trash Zoo,” – a wild animal attraction featuring a zebra, a chimpanzee, and a panther, among other things.

Felicity Turnado has it all – looks, money, and a secret that she’s kept hidden. She knows that one misstep could send her tumbling from the top of the social ladder, and she’s worked hard to make everyone forget that she was with the Montors the night they disappeared. Felicity has buried what she knows so deeply that she can’t even remember what it is… only that she can’t look at Tress without having a panic attack.

But she’ll have to.

Tress has a plan. A Halloween costume party at an abandoned house provides the ideal situation for Tress to pry the truth from Felicity – brick by brick – as she slowly seals her former best friend into a coal chute. With a drunken party above them, and a loose panther on the prowl, Tress will have her answers – or settle for revenge.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Rape implied
  • Seizures
  • Dubious consent, implied
  • Drug dealing
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Recreational drug use
  • Graphic illness, specifically flu breakout
  • Graphic emesis
  • Graphic physical injury
  • Blood and gore depiction
  • Death of a friend
  • Death of parents
  • Grief depiction
  • Kidnapping
  • Captivity
  • Death of a pet
  • Animal attack
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Ghost Wood Song by Erica Waters

Ghost Wood Song by Erica Waters

If I could have a fiddle made of Daddy’s bones, I’d play it. I’d learn all the secrets he kept.

Shady Grove inherited her father’s ability to call ghosts from the grave with his fiddle, but she also knows the fiddle’s tunes bring nothing but trouble and darkness.

But when her brother is accused of murder, she can’t let the dead keep their secrets.

In order to clear his name, she’s going to have to make those ghosts sing.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Ableist language
  • Attempted rape recounted (chp. 23)
  • Child abuse recounted, including being locked in the attics for extended periods of tie
  • Agoraphobia
  • Panic attack (chp. 24)
  • Death of a mother to suicide recounted
  • Recreational drug use (on-page in chp. 5 & mentioned otherwise)
  • Hospital (chp. 5 & 24)
  • Grief & loss (theme)
  • Death of a father recounted
  • Death of a stepfather (off-page)
  • Death of a sister recounted
  • Gun violence (chp. 28)
  • Police violence (chp. 28)
  • Hanging mentioned (chp. 9)
  • Near-drowning incident
  • Car accident (on-page, chp. 23-24)
  • Death of a child to a wasp attack recounted
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Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley

Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley

Firekeeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley book cover

As a biracial, unenrolled tribal member and the product of a scandal, eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine has never quite fit in, both in her hometown and on the nearby Ojibwe reservation. Daunis dreams of studying medicine, but when her family is struck by tragedy, she puts her future on hold to care for her fragile mother.

The only bright spot is meeting Jamie, the charming new recruit on her brother Levi’s hockey team. Yet even as Daunis falls for Jamie, certain details… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Ableism
  • Misogyny
  • Fatmisia
  • Racism & racial slurs
  • Sexual harassment
  • Sexual assault, on-page
  • Rape, on-page
  • Cheating recounted
  • Child abuse & neglect mentioned
  • Substance addiction discussed
  • Nightmares
  • Suicide by a gunshot to the head, on-page
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Drug use & abuse (theme)
  • Overdose mentioned
  • Teen pregnancy recounted
  • Grandparent recovering from a stroke
  • Physical injuries, including nerve damage & chronic shoulder injury
  • Hospitalisation for internalised bleeding & liver damage
  • Surgery mentioned
  • Emesis
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of an uncle
  • Death of a father
  • Murder of a friend & teenager by gun violence, on-page
  • Car accident, on- & off-page
  • Bullying
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What Momma Left Me by Renée Watson

What Momma Left Me by Renée Watson

How is it that unsavory raw ingredients come together to form a delicious cake? What is it about life that when you take all the hard stuff and rough stuff and add in a lot of love, you still just might have a wonderful life?

For Serenity, these questions rise up early when her father kills her mother, and leaves her and her brother Danny to live with their kind but strict grandparents. Despite the difficulties of a new school, a new church, and a new neighborhood, Serenity gains strength from the family around her, the new friends she finds, and her own careful optimism.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Domestic violence
  • Sexual assault mentioned
  • Suicide mentioned
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a mother recounted
  • Gun violence
  • Poverty themes
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Watch Us Rise by Renée Watson and Ellen Hagan

Watch Us Rise by Renée Watson & Ellen Hagan

Jasmine and Chelsea are sick of the way women are treated even at their progressive NYC high school, so they decide to start a Women’s Rights Club. They post everything online—poems, essays, videos of Chelsea performing her poetry, and Jasmine’s response to the racial macroaggressions she experiences—and soon they go viral. But with such positive support, the club is also targeted by online trolls. When things escalate, the principal shuts the club down. Jasmine and Chelsea will risk everything for their voices—and those of other young women—to be heard.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Ableism & ableist language
  • Fatmisia & body shaming
  • Sexism
  • Racism, including cultural appropriation & anti-Blackness
  • Sexual harassment
  • Grey-area cheating
  • Death of a parent to cancer
  • Hospital
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a father & husband
  • Bullying
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Wing Jones by Katherine Webber

Wing Jones by Katherine Webber

Also known as The Heartbeats of Wing Jones.

Wing Jones, like everyone else in her town, has worshipped her older brother, Marcus, for as long as she can remember. Until the night when everything changes. Marcus, drunk at the wheel after a party, kills two people and barely survives himself. With Marcus now in a coma, Wing is crushed, confused, and angry—could Marcus, the golden boy, really have done something so irresponsible, so reckless? To make matters worse, the bank is threatening to repossess her family’s house because all their money is going to pay her brother’s mounting medical bills.

Every night, unable to sleep, Wing finds herself sneaking out to go to the school’s empty track. When Aaron, Marcus’s best friend, sees her running one night, he recognizes that her speed, skill, and agility could get her spot on the track team—and better still, a shot at a coveted sponsorship from a major athletic gear company. Wing can’t pass up the opportunity to train with her longtime crush and to help her struggling family, but can she handle being thrust out of Marcus’s shadow and into the spotlight?

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism
  • Graphic physical injuries
  • Coma
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Car accident
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Neverland by Shari Arnold

Neverland by Shari Arnold

Neverland by Shari Arnold book cover

It’s been four months since seventeen-year-old Livy Cloud lost her younger sister, but she isn’t quite ready to move on with her life — not even close. She’d rather spend her time at the Seattle Children’s hospital, reading to the patients and holding onto memories of the sister who was everything to her and more.

But when she meets the mysterious and illusive Meyer she is drawn into a world of adventure, a world where questions abound.

Is she ready to live life without her sister? Or more importantly, is she brave enough to love again?

In this modern reimagining of Peter Pan, will Livy lose herself to Neverland or will she find what she’s been searching for?

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Grief depiction
  • Death of a child
  • Death of a sister
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Alone in the Wild by Kelley Armstrong

Alone in the Wild by Kelley Armstrong

Alone in the Wild by Kelley Armstrong book cover

Every season in Rockton seems to bring a new challenge. At least that’s what Detective Casey Duncan has felt since she decided to call this place home. Between all the secretive residents, the sometimes-hostile settlers outside, and the surrounding wilderness, there’s always something to worry about.

While on a much needed camping vacation with her boyfriend, Sheriff Eric Dalton, Casey hears a baby crying in the woods. The sound leads them to a tragic scene: a woman buried under the snow, murdered, a baby still alive in her arms… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Forced sex work, mentioned
  • Sexual slavery, mentioned
  • Recreational drug use
  • Blood depiction
  • Death and loss depiction
  • Murder
  • Gun violence
  • Animal injury
  • Animal death
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Toffee by Sarah Crossan

Toffee by Sarah Crossan

Also known as Being Toffee.

One is trying to forget. The other is trying to remember.

After running away from an abusive home, Allison finds herself taking shelter in a shed behind an abandoned house. But the house isn’t empty after all; an elderly woman named Marla, who suffers from dementia, lives there. And rather than turn her away, Marla welcomes her – she mistakes Allison for an old friend from her past named Toffee.

Allison is used to hiding who she really is, and trying to be what other people want her to be, so she decides to play along. But as their bond grows, and Allison discovers how much Marla needs a real companion, Allison begins to waver. They both deserve a home, a safe place, and a family – but at what cost?

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Sexism
  • Slut shaming
  • Sexual harassment
  • Physical, verbal & emotional child abuse (theme)
  • Domestic violence and physical & emotional abuse
  • Elder abuse
  • Cheating mentioned
  • Depersonalisation
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Self-harm
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Recreational drug use (smoking)
  • Death from childbirth & traumatic childbirth mentioned
  • Dementia (theme)
  • Minor blood depiction & physical injuries, including burns
  • Emesis
  • Hospital
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a mother & wife recounted
  • Homelessness
  • Animal death
  • Death of a pet dog mentioned
  • Animal attack mentioned
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The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Kiersten White

The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankentstein by Kiersten White

Elizabeth Lavenza hasn’t had a proper meal in weeks. Her thin arms are covered with bruises from her “caregiver,” and she is on the verge of being thrown into the streets . . . until she is brought to the home of Victor Frankenstein, an unsmiling, solitary boy who has everything–except a friend.

Victor is her escape from misery. Elizabeth does everything she can to make herself indispensable–and it works. She is taken in by the Frankenstein family and rewarded with a warm bed, delicious food, and dresses of the finest silk. Soon she and Victor are inseparable.

But her new life comes at a price. As the years pass, Elizabeth’s survival depends on managing Victor’s dangerous temper and entertaining his every whim, no matter how depraved. Behind her blue eyes and sweet smile lies the calculating heart of a girl determined to stay alive no matter the cost . . . as the world she knows is consumed by darkness.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Ableism & ableist language
  • Classism
  • Misogyny
  • Slut shaming
  • Graphic physical, verbal & emotional abuse
  • Parental abandonment
  • Intimate partner abuse & violence
  • Nightmares
  • Self-sacrifice (on-page) & suicidal ideation mentioned
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Nonconsensual drugging
  • Graphic blood & gore depiction
  • Graphic dead bodies & body parts
  • Graphic physical injuries & wound descriptions
  • Graphic medical procedures & experiments
  • Emesis
  • Forced hospitalisation
  • Body horror
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a mother recounted
  • Death of an uncle (off-page)
  • Death of a friend
  • Death of a child
  • Death of a brother
  • Murder & attempted murder
  • Gun violence
  • Graphic strangulation
  • Hanging (off-page)
  • Fire (multiple scenes)
  • Kidnapping & captivity
  • Building collapse
  • Stalking
  • Graphic animal abuse (on-page) & animal death
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