A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson

The case is closed. Five years ago, schoolgirl Andie Bell was murdered by Sal Singh. The police know he did it. Everyone in town knows he did it.

But having grown up in the same small town that was consumed by the murder, Pippa Fitz-Amobi isn’t so sure. When she chooses the case as the topic for her final year project, she starts to uncover secrets that someone in town desperately wants to stay hidden. And if the real killer is still out there, how far will they go to keep Pip from the truth?

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism
  • Sexual assault
  • Statutory rape
  • Rape recounted
  • Student-teacher relationship
  • Suicide
  • Disordered eating mentioned
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Recreational drug use
  • Nonconsensual drugging (roofies)
  • Death of a parent recounted
  • Murder
  • Car accident recounted
  • Kidnapping
  • Blackmail
  • Animal death
  • Bullying
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Across the Universe by Beth Revis

Across the Universe by Beth Revis

Seventeen-year-old Amy joins her parents as frozen cargo aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed and expects to awaken on a new planet, three hundred years in the future. Never could she have known that her frozen slumber would come to an end fifty years too soon and that she would be thrust into the brave new world of a spaceship that lives by its own rules.

Amy quickly realizes that her awakening was no mere computer malfunction. Someone—one of the few thousand inhabitants of the spaceship —tried to kill her. And if Amy doesn’t do something soon, her parents will be next.

Now Amy must race to unlock Godspeed’s hidden secrets. But out of her list of murder suspects, there’s only one who matters: Elder, the future leader of the ship and the love she could never have seen coming.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Ableism
  • Attempted rape
  • Suicide
  • Drugging
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Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

In 1976, Dana dreams of being a writer. In 1815, she is assumed a slave.

When Dana first meets Rufus on a Maryland plantation, he’s drowning. She saves his life – and it will happen again and again. Neither of them understands his power to summon her whenever his life is threatened, nor the significance of the ties that bind them. And each time Dana saves him, the more aware she is that her own life might be over before it’s even begun.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism & racial slurs
  • Slavery
  • Rape
  • Sexual assault
  • Suicide
  • Self harm
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Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

This is Britain as you’ve never seen it.
This is Britain as it has never been told.

From Newcastle to Cornwall, from the birth of the twentieth century to the teens of the twenty-first, Girl Woman Other follows a cast of twelve characters on their personal journeys through this country and the last hundred years. They’re each looking for something – a shared past, an unexpected future, a place to call home, somewhere to fit in, a lover, a missed mother, a lost father, even just a touch of hope . . .

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism & racial slurs
  • Misogyny
  • Homomisia
  • Transmisia
  • Misgendering
  • Deadnaming
  • Rape
  • Sexual assault
  • Domestic abuse
  • Emotional & physical abuse
  • Cheating
  • Drug use
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My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

2000. Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful forty-two-year-old English teacher.

2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa, and now Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past. But how can Vanessa reject her first love, the man who fundamentally transformed her and has been a persistent presence in her life? Is it possible that the man she loved as a teenager—and who professed to worship only her—may be far different from what she has always believed? … Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Slut-shaming
  • Fatmisia & body shaming
  • Adult-minor relationship
  • Student-teacher relationship
  • Paedophilia, grooming & child sexual abuse
  • Rape, including statutory rape
  • Sexual assault
  • Child pornography
  • Emotional abuse & gaslighting
  • Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
  • Dissociation
  • Suicide
  • Substance addiction
  • Alcoholism
  • Alcohol consumption & abuse
  • Recreational drug use
  • Disordered eating
  • Death of a dog
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Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter’s dreams. Together with Walter—environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man—she was doing her small part to build a better world.

But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz—outré rocker and Walter’s college best friend and rival—still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty?

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Sexual assault
  • Cheating
  • Substance addiction
  • Drug use & abuse
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The Alienist by Caleb Carr

The Alienist by Caleb Carr

The year is 1896, the place, New York City. On a cold March night “New York Times” reporter John Schuyler Moore is summoned to the East River by his friend and former Harvard classmate Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, a psychologist, or “alienist.” On the unfinished Williamsburg Bridge, they view the horribly mutilated body of an adolescent boy, a prostitute from one of Manhattan’s infamous brothels.

The newly appointed police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, in a highly unorthodox move, enlists the two men in the murder investigation, counting on the reserved Kreizler’s intellect and Moore’s knowledge of New York’s vast criminal underworld. They are joined by Sara Howard, a brave and determined woman who works as a secretary in the police department. Laboring in secret… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Sexism
  • Racism
  • Attempted rape
  • Suicide
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Release by Patrick Ness

Release by Patrick Ness

It’s Saturday, it’s summer and, although he doesn’t know it yet, everything in Adam Thorn’s life is going to fall apart. Relationships will change, he’ll change, but maybe, just maybe, he’ll find freedom in the release.

Time is running out though, because way across town a ghost as risen from the lake. Searching, yearning, she leaves a trail of destruction in her wake…

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Homomisia
  • Victim blaming
  • Sexual assault
  • Substance addiction
  • Drug use & abuse
  • Graphic dismemberment
  • Murder
  • Strangulation
  • Drowning
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Legendary by Stephanie Garber

Legendary by Stephanie Garber

After being swept up in the magical world of Caraval, Donatella Dragna has finally escaped her father and saved her sister, Scarlett, from a disastrous arranged marriage. The girls should be celebrating, but Tella isn’t yet free. She made a desperate bargain with a mysterious criminal, and what Tella owes him no one has ever been able to deliver: Caraval Master Legend’s true name. The only chance of uncovering Legend’s identity is to win Caraval, so Tella throws herself into the legendary competition once more—and into the path of the murderous heir to the throne, a doomed love story, and a web of secrets…including her sister’s. Caraval has always demanded bravery, cunning… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Attempted rape mentioned
  • Parental abandonment & child abuse discussed
  • Suicide recounted
  • Alcohol consumption (on-page, protagonist) & mentions of smoking
  • Blood & injury depiction, including magical healing by drinking blood after a near-fatal fall into freezing water
  • Death of a fiancé mentioned
  • Death of a grandmother mentioned
  • Murder
  • Physical assault & assault with a knife
  • Imprisonment

Caraval by Stephanie Garber

Caraval by Stephanie Garber

Scarlett Dragna has never left the tiny island where she and her sister, Tella, live with their powerful, and cruel, father. Now Scarlett’s father has arranged a marriage for her, and Scarlett thinks her dreams of seeing Caraval—the faraway, once-a-year performance where the audience participates in the show—are over. But this year, Scarlett’s long-dreamt-of invitation finally arrives. With the help of a mysterious sailor, Tella whisks Scarlett away to the show. Only, as soon as they arrive, Tella is kidnapped by Caraval’s mastermind organizer, Legend. It turns out that this season’s Caraval revolves around Tella, and whoever finds her first is… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Child abuse discussed
  • Blood-drinking
  • Alcohol consumption & drugging
  • Suicide from a fall off a balcony discussed (on-page)
  • Self-injury
  • Torture
  • Murder from stabbing
  • Kidnapping