Tag Archives: Police Brutality & Violence

All of Us With Wings by Michelle Ruiz Keil

Seventeen-year-old Xochi is alone in San Francisco, running from her painful past: the mother who abandoned her, the man who betrayed her. Then one day, she meets Pallas, a precocious twelve-year-old who lives with her rock-star family in one of the city’s storybook Victorians. Xochi accepts a position as Pallas’s live-in governess and quickly finds her place in their household, which is relaxed and happy despite the band’s larger-than-life fame. But on the night of the Vernal Equinox, as a concert afterparty rages in the house below, Xochi and Pallas accidentally… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Sexism
  • Rape recounted & sexual assault
  • Child sex trafficking, implied
  • Adult-minor relationship*
  • Child abuse & neglect
  • Alcohol consumption & recreational drug use

*Context: The main characters is a seventeen-year-old girl whose love interest is her twenty-eight-year-old male employer.

All American Boys by Jason Reynolds

All American Boys by Jason Reynolds

A bag of chips. That’s all sixteen-year-old Rashad is looking for at the corner bodega. What he finds instead is a fist-happy cop, Paul Galuzzi, who mistakes Rashad for a shoplifter, mistakes Rashad’s pleadings that he’s stolen nothing for belligerence, mistakes Rashad’s resistance to leave the bodega as resisting arrest, mistakes Rashad’s every flinch at every punch the cop throws as further resistance and refusal to STAY STILL as ordered. But how can you stay still when someone is pounding your face into the concrete pavement? .But there were witnesses: Quinn Collins.. Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism & racial profiling
  • Police brutality (police shooting)
  • Gun violence

King and the Dragonflies by Kacen Callender

King and the Dragonflies by Kacen Callender

Twelve-year-old Kingston James is sure his brother Khalid has turned into a dragonfly. When Khalid unexpectedly passed away, he shed what was his first skin for another to live down by the bayou in their small Louisiana town. Khalid still visits in dreams, and King must keep these secrets to himself as he watches grief transform his family. It would be easier if King could talk with his best friend, Sandy Sanders. But just days before he died, Khalid told King to end their friendship, after overhearing a secret about Sandy—that he thinks he might be gay. “You don’t want anyone to think you’re gay too, do you?” But when Sandy goes… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Homomisia, internalised homomisia & homomisic slurs (theme)
  • Racism & racial slurs
  • Hate crimes mentioned
  • Coming out themes
  • Child abuse
  • Domestic abuse mentioned
  • Parental abandonment
  • Recreational drug use mentioned
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a brother from a heart attack (theme)
  • Police brutality mentioned
  • Animal death, on-page