Private Lessons by Cynthia Salaysay

Private Lessons by Cynthia Salaysay

After seventeen-year-old Claire Alalay’s father’s death, only music has helped her channel her grief. Claire likes herself best when she plays his old piano, a welcome escape from the sadness — and her traditional Filipino mother’s prayer groups. In the hopes of earning a college scholarship, Claire auditions for Paul Avon, a prominent piano teacher, who agrees to take Claire as a pupil. Soon Claire loses herself in Paul’s world and his way of digging into a composition’s emotional core. She pra… Read more.

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Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Statutory rape, on-page
  • Paedophilia & grooming
  • Teacher-student relationship
  • Emotional & verbal abuse
  • Depression
  • Self-harm
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Smoking
  • Death of a parent from cancer
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Unearthly by Cynthia Hand

Unearthly by Cynthia Hand

In the beginning, there’s a boy standing in the trees…
Clara Gardner has recently learned that she’s part angel. Having angel blood run through her veins not only makes her smarter, stronger, and faster than humans (a word, she realizes, that no longer applies to her), but it means she has a purpose, something she was put on this earth to do. Figuring out what that is, though, isn’t easy.

Her visions of a raging forest fire and an alluring stranger lead her to a new school in a new town… Read more.

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Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Antiziganism
  • Rape mentioned
  • Forest fire
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Fallen by Mia Sheridan

Fallen by Mia Sheridan

Scarlett Lattimore arrives at Lilith House, an abandoned mansion built in 1876, that later housed a reform school for troubled girls, to start a new life with her seven-year-old daughter.

But between the nearby town with the strange, disconcerting feel, the deputy sheriff who is equal parts intriguing and suspicious, and the discovery that their new home holds a dark and violent past, Scarlett soon begins to question her rash decision… Read more.

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Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Rape, on-page
  • Animal cruelty
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Where the Truth Lives by Mia Sheridan

Where the Truth Lives by Mia Sheridan

When the director of a local mental health hospital is found murdered and mutilated, Homicide Detective Reed Davies is first on scene. What was done to the body is gruesome. Inexplicable. But Reed is dealt another curveball when he finds that the doctor who discovered the victim is someone Reed is intimately familiar with—a woman with whom he shared one passionate night weeks before.

Dr. Elizabeth Nolan is somehow tangled up in the crime, and even while Reed must now question her… Read more.

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Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Rape of a child recounted
  • Domestic abuse
  • Murder
  • Kidnapping
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Where the Blame Lies by Mia Sheridan

Where the Blame Lies by Mia Sheridan

At nineteen years old, college student Josie Stratton was kidnapped by a madman and held shackled for ten months in an abandoned warehouse before she finally escaped her hellish prison.

Eight years later, when the body of a young woman is found chained in the basement of a vacant house, Cincinnati Police Detective Zach Copeland is instantly reminded of the crime committed against Josie Stratton. Zach was just a rookie on the perimeter of… Read more.

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Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Rape
  • Child abuse recounted
  • Cheating, off-page
  • Murder, on-page
  • Kidnapping & captivity recounted
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Archer’s Voice by Mia Sheridan

Archer’s Voice by Mia Sheridan

When Bree Prescott arrives in the sleepy, lakeside town of Pelion, Maine, she hopes against hope that this is the place where she will finally find the peace she so desperately seeks. On her first day there, her life collides with Archer Hale, an isolated man who holds a secret agony of his own. A man no one else sees.

Archer’s Voice is the story of a woman chained to the memory of one horrifying night and the man… Read more.

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Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Domestic abuse
  • Attempted rape
  • Death of parents, off-page
  • Murder
  • Gun violence
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The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak 

The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak

Ella Rubenstein is forty years old and unhappily married when she takes a job as a reader for a literary agent. Her first assignment is to read and report on Sweet Blasphemy, a novel written by a man named Aziz Zahara. Ella is mesmerized by his tale of Shams’s search for Rumi and the dervish’s role in transforming the successful but unhappy cleric into a committed mystic, passionate poet, and advocate of love. She is also taken with Shams’s lessons, or rules, that offer insight into an ancient philosophy based on the unity of all people and religions, and the presence of love in each and every one of us. As she… Read more.

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Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Rape
  • Infidelity
  • Murder
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An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir

An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir

Laia is a slave. Elias is a soldier. Neither is free.

Under the Martial Empire, defiance is met with death. Those who do not vow their blood and bodies to the Emperor risk the execution of their loved ones and the destruction of all they hold dear. It is in this brutal world, inspired by ancient Rome, that Laia lives with her grandparents and older brother. The family ekes out an existence in the Empire’s impoverished… Read more.

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Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Slavery
  • Rape & threats of rape mentioned
  • Death of parents recounted
  • Murder & genocide
  • Graphic torture
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The Russian Cage by Charlaine Harris

The Russian Cage by Charlaine Harris

Picking up right where A Longer Fall left off, this thrilling third installment follows Lizbeth Rose as she takes on one of her most dangerous missions yet: rescuing her estranged partner, Prince Eli, from the Holy Russian Empire. Once in San Diego, Lizbeth is going to have to rely upon her sister Felicia, and her growing Grigori powers to navigate her way through this strange new world of royalty and deception in order to get Eli freed from jail where he’s being held for murder.

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Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Rape mentioned
  • Suicide mentioned
  • Gun violence
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An Easy Death by Charlaine Harris

An Easy Death by Charlaine Harris

In the southwestern country now known as Texoma, this is a world where magic is acknowledged but mistrusted. Battered by a run across the border to Mexico, gunslinger Lizbeth Rose takes a job offer from a pair of Russian wizards.

She may be young, but Gunnie Rose has acquired a fearsome reputation and the wizards are at a desperate crossroads, even if they won’t admit it… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Rape & attempted rape
  • Kidnapping
  • Gun violence
  • Loss of autonomy (mind control)
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