Tag Archives: Mental Illness

Our Last Echoes by Kate Alice Marshall

Sophia’s first memory is of drowning. She remembers the darkness of the water and the briny taste as it fills her throat. She remembers the cold shock of going under. She remembers her mother pulling her to safety before disappearing forever. But Sophia has never been in the ocean. And her mother died years ago in a hospital. Or so she has been told her whole life. A series of clues have led Sophia to the island of Bitter Rock, Alaska, where she talked her way into a summer internship at the Landon Avian Research Center, the same center her mother worked at right before she died. There, she meets the disarmingly… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Memory loss
  • Panic attack
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Body horror
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a parent
  • Drowning
  • Animal death

What Lies in the Woods by Kate Alice Marshall

Naomi Shaw used to believe in magic. Twenty-two years ago, she and her two best friends, Cassidy and Olivia, spent the summer roaming the woods, imagining a world of ceremony and wonder. They called it the Goddess Game. The summer ended suddenly when Naomi was attacked. Miraculously, she survived her seventeen stab wounds and lived to identify the man who had hurt her. The girls’ testimony put away a serial killer, wanted for murdering six women. They were heroes. For decades afterward, the friends have kept a secret worth killing for. But now Olivia wants to tell, and Naomi sets out to find out what really… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Attempted sexual assault of a child
  • Infidelity
  • Hoarding
  • Attempted suicide & suicidal ideation recounted (secondary character)
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Attempted murder of a child recounted
  • Gun & knife violence
  • Blackmail

Bad Girl Reputation by Elle Kennedy

When former bad girl Genevieve West returns home for her mother’s funeral, she’s prepared to keep her distance from her ex-boyfriend, Evan Hartley. Their history is rife with turbulence. And passion. A heck of a lot of passion… which she’s trying desperately to forget. But it’s impossible not to run into Evan in the small coastal town where they once ran wild. And the moment she sees her gorgeous ex again, it’s clear to Gen that Evan is still as unruly, sexy, and irresistible as ever. This time around, however, she’s resolved to walk a new path. No more partying. No more foolish mistakes. Her plan is to temporarily remain in town to… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Parental abandonment
  • Alcoholism
  • Alcohol consumption & abuse
  • Drug abuse
  • Death of a parent

The Charlie Method by Elle Kennedy

College senior Charlotte Kingston is living two lives―and she’s nailing both of them. By day, she’s the perfect sorority girl, a STEM student in biomedical engineering, and the adopted daughter of an overachiever family. At night, she’s Charlie: a risk-taking daredevil looking for fun who finds herself chatting on a dating app with two anonymous hotties. Will Larsen may seem like the breezy boy next door, but his congressman father is a constant thorn in his side. After a scandal hits another Division 1 hockey program, Will’s dad is determined to distance his son from it, hiring a journalist to prove how squeaky-clean… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Anxiety & panic attacks
  • Terminal cancer

I’m Not Done with You Yet by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Jane is unhappy. A struggling midlist writer whose novels barely command four figures, she feels trapped in an underwhelming marriage, just scraping by to pay a crippling Bay Area mortgage for a house–a life–she’s never really wanted. There’s only ever been one person she cared about, one person who truly understood her: Thalia. Jane’s best and only friend nearly a decade ago during their Creative Writing days at Oxford. It was the only good year of Jane’s life–cobblestones and books and damp English air, heady wine and sweet cider and Thalia, endless Thalia. But then one night ruined everything. The blood-soaked night…. Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Toxic friendship
  • Emotional abuse & gaslighting
  • Infidelity mentioned
  • Social Anxiety
  • Heart attack mentioned
  • Murder by poisoning & stabbing
  • Strangulation

My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

Jade Daniels is an angry, half-Indian outcast with an abusive father, an absent mother, and an entire town that wants nothing to do with her. She lives in her own world, a world in which protection comes from an unusual source: horror movies… especially the ones where a masked killer seeks revenge on a world that wronged them. And Jade narrates the quirky history of Proofrock as if it is one of those movies. But when blood actually starts to spill into the waters of Indian Lake, she pulls us into her dizzying, encyclopedic mind of blood and masked murderers, and predicts exactly how the plot will unfold. Yet, even as Jade… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Sexual harassment
  • Nonconsensual voyeurism of children mentioned
  • Rape of a child
  • Incest (father-daughter)
  • Child pregnancy from rape
  • Parent with alcoholism
  • Attempted suicide & suicidal ideation
  • Self-harm
  • Graphic blood & gore depiction, including dead bodies
  • Emesis
  • Animal abuse

The Obsession by Jesse Q Sutanto

Nobody knows Delilah like Logan does. Nobody. He makes sure of it by learning everything he can through her social media and watching her through a hidden camera he has trained on her house. Some might call him a stalker. Logan prefers to be called “romantic.” But after Logan sees Delilah killing her abusive stepfather, he realizes there’s still more about her to discover. His sweet, perfect Delilah isn’t so perfect after all. Delilah knows she should feel guilty, but all she feels is free. She’s so over the men in her life controlling her. Except Logan saw what she did, and he won’t let… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism & sexism
  • Attempted suicide
  • Substance addiction
  • Drugging & overdose
  • Stalking

This Might Get Awkward by Kara McDowell

Seventeen-year-old Gemma’s favorite kind of beach is an empty one. Social interactions are too much for her to handle. She always says the wrong thing—if she manages to say anything at all. She can’t even bring herself to speak to her longtime crush, Beau Booker, without losing sleep over her own awkwardness. During a solo outing to her favorite beach, Gemma realizes—to her horror—that the popular kids from school have shown up to throw a party. Before she can sneak away (and possibly puke behind her car) Gemma is pulled into the action and ends up talking to… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Social Anxiety Disorder (protagonist)

Final Word by Janet Sumner Johnson

Thirteen-year-old twins Hope and Gordon enter a spelling bee in a last-ditch effort to save their family from financial ruin, only to find themselves in a cut-throat competition to uncover a fortune and dark secrets about the wealthy relations they’ve never known. Hope Smith can’t stand rich people—the dictionary magnate family the Wintertons most of all. Not since she and her twin brother, Gordon, learned that their dad was one. So when Gordon enters the family into the Winterton’s charity spelling bee, Hope wants nothing to do with it. But with… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Familial estrangement due to substance addiction
  • Gambling addiction mentioned (secondary character)
  • Death of a teenage boy in a car accident
  • Kidnapping & captivity

The First Mistake by Sandie Jones

THE WIFE: For Alice, life has never been better. With her second husband, she has a successful business, two children, and a beautiful house. HER HUSBAND: Alice knows that life could have been different if her first husband had lived, but Nathan’s arrival into her life gave her back the happiness she craved. HER BEST FRIEND: Through the ups and downs of life, from celebratory nights out to comforting each other through loss, Alice knows that with her best friend Beth by her side, they can survive anything together. So when Nathan starts acting strangely, Alice… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Abandonment
  • Depression
  • Death of a spouse