Shame Is an Ocean I Swim Across by Mary Lambert

Shame Is an Ocean I Swim Across by Mary Lambert

Beautiful and brutally honest, Mary Lambert’s poetry is a beacon to anyone who’s ever been knocked down–and picked themselves up again. In verse that deals with sexual assault, mental illness, and body acceptance, Ms. Lambert’s Shame Is an Ocean I Swim Across emerges as an important new voice in poetry, providing strength and resilience even in the darkest of times.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Rape
  • Sexual assault
  • Incest
  • Self-harm
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How She Died, How I Lived by Mary Crockett 

How She Died, How I Lived by Mary Crockett

On the eve of Kyle’s sentencing a year after Jamie’s death, all the other “chosen ones” are coping in various ways. But our tenacious narrator is full of anger, stuck somewhere between the horrifying past and the unknown future as she tries to piece together why she gets to live, while Jamie is dead.

Now she finds herself drawn to Charlie, Jamie’s boyfriend–knowing all the while that their relationship will always be haunted by what-ifs and why-nots… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Rape
  • Murder
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A Taste of Seduction by Mary Campisi

A Taste of Seduction by Mary Campisi

A young woman of noble blood, raised as a peasant girl… An orphaned stable boy, now grown and the surrogate son of a powerful earl—the same earl who just so happens to be the young woman’s father

Francie Jordan and Alexander Bishop have nothing in common—she runs barefoot and talks to animals. He won’t loosen his cravat unless the bedroom door is firmly closed. She believes in love, second chances, and happily ever after. He believes in keeping a safe distance… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Attempted rape
  • Domestic violence recounted
  • Death during childbirth
  • Blood depiction
  • Death of a parent
  • Gun violence
  • Kidnapping
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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.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

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.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

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.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

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.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

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.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

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.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

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.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Rape
  • Infidelity
  • Murder
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