Faith: Greater Heights by Julie Murphy

Faith: Greater Heights by Julie Murphy

Faith Herbert can finally admit that she’s not a regular teen. Thankfully, her two best friends, Matt and Ches, are now in on her superhero secret. But after the chaos of her first semester, Faith just wants to end her senior year on a normal note—enjoying all the hallmarks of graduating high school—like prom! And, possibly, getting to attend college in the fall. A new teacher has taken over journalism class, and Faith is only occasionally reminded of the empty spot left by Colleen Bristow, the quiet nerd-turned-supervillain. That is, until Faith hears from Peter that other psiots have been… Read more.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Strangulation
  • Physical assault
  • Fire
  • Loss of autonomy (mind control)

Breathe My Name by RA Nelson 

Breathe My Name by R.A. Nelson

I need to see you. Please come right away. We have to finish.

Frances Robinson is in high school now. She lives a quiet, suburban life, far from her horrifying past. When she was a child, her birthmother smothered her three sisters. Through pure luck, Frances survived. Now her mother has just been released from prison . . . and she wants to see Frances.

A new boy at school called Nix charms Frances. Together, Nix and Frances embark on a clandestine journey to visit Frances’ mother: to confront the monster in its lair. This trip will help Frances at last find peace or die trying. But no matter what, Frances will discover just what it means to finish.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Blood depiction
  • Death of sisters recounted
  • Filicide by suffocation recounted
  • Murder & attempted murder
  • Parent in incarceration

Two Can Keep a Secret by Karen McManus

Two Can Keep a Secret by Karen M. McManus

Echo Ridge is small-town America. Ellery’s never been there, but she’s heard all about it. Her aunt went missing there at age seventeen. And only five years ago, a homecoming queen put the town on the map when she was killed. Now Ellery has to move there to live with a grandmother she barely knows.

The town is picture-perfect, but it’s hiding secrets. And before school even begins for Ellery, someone’s declared open season on homecoming, promising to make it as dangerous as it was five years ago. Then, almost as if to prove it, another girl goes missing.

Ellery knows all about secrets. Her mother has them; her grandmother does too. … Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Sexual assault
  • Drug abuse
  • Alcohol consumption & abuse
  • Murder
  • Suffocation
  • Hit-and-run car accident
  • Disappearance of a loved one

The Overstory by Richard Powers

The Overstory by Richard Powers

An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another.

These four, and five other strangers – each summoned in different ways by trees – are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Cheating
  • Suicide
  • Police brutality
  • Torture
  • Asphyxiation
  • Eco-terrorism

Gallant by V.E. Schwab

Gallant by V.E. Schwab

Sixteen-year-old Olivia Prior is missing three things: a mother, a father, and a voice. Her mother vanished all at once, and her father by degrees, and her voice was a thing she never had to start with. She grew up at Merilance School for Girls. Now, nearing the end of her time there, Olivia receives a letter from an uncle she’s never met, her father’s older brother, summoning her to his estate, a place called Gallant. But when she arrives, she discovers that the letter she received was several years old. Her uncle is dead. The estate is empty, save for the servants. Olivia is permitted to… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Ableism & ableist language
  • Parental abandonment
  • Child abuse & neglect
  • Mutism (protagonist)
  • Nightmares
  • Alcoholism, implied
  • Blood depiction
  • Death of a brother by knife violence recounted
  • Death of a mother & father mentioned
  • Death of a cousin (on-page)
  • Murder
  • Knife & sword violence
  • Strangulation
  • Bullying
  • Graphic animal death (crow, cat)

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell

Edinburgh in the 1930s. The Lennox family is having trouble with its youngest daughter. Esme is outspoken, unconventional, and repeatedly embarrasses them in polite society. Something will have to be done.

Years later, a young woman named Iris Lockhart receives a letter informing her that she has a great-aunt in a psychiatric unit who is about to be released.

Iris has never heard of Esme Lennox and the one person who should know more, her grandmother Kitty, seems unable to answer Iris’s questions. What could Esme have done to warrant a lifetime in an institution? And how is it possible for a person to be so completely erased from a family’s history?

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Familial abandonment
  • Cheating
  • Incest (step-siblings)
  • Rape
  • Pregnancy from rape
  • Forced adoption
  • Death of a baby
  • Murder by suffocation

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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A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

It’s 1895, and after the suicide of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence, a proper boarding school in England. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma’s reception there is a chilly one. To make things worse, she’s been followed by a mysterious young Indian man, a man sent to watch her. But why? What is her destiny? And what will her entanglement with Spence’s most powerful girls—and their foray into the spiritual world—lead to?

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Sexism
  • Antiziganism
  • Parent with substance addiction
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Suicide
  • Self-harm
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Dead body
  • Death of a mother from suicide by knife violence
  • Death of a child by suffocation
  • Murder
  • Fire
  • Animal death & cruelty
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Colorado Kid by Stephen King

Colorado Kid by Stephen King

On an island off the coast of Maine, a man is found dead. There’s no identification on the body. Only the dogged work of a pair of local newspapermen and a graduate student in forensics turns up any clues.

But that’s just the beginning of the mystery. Because the more they learn about the man and the baffling circumstances of his death, the less they understand. Was it an impossible crime? Or something stranger still…?

 

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Dead body
  • Death from asphyxiation
  • Murder discussed
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Christine by Stephen King

Christine by Stephen King

Christine, blood-red, faIt’s love at first sight for high school student Arnie Cunningham when he and his best friend Dennis Guilder spot the dilapidated 1958 red-and-white Plymouth Fury for sale—dubbed “Christine” by its original cantankerous owner—rusting away on a front lawn of their suburban Pennsylvania neighborhood. Dennis knows that Arnie’s never had much luck in the looks or popularity department, or really taken an interest in owning a car . . . but Christine quickly changes all that. Arnie suddenly has the newfound confidence to stick up for himself, going as far as dating the most beautiful girl at Libertyville High—transfer student Leigh Cabot—even as a mysteriously restored Christine systematically and terrifyingly consumes every aspect of Arnie’s life.

Dennis and Leigh soon realize that they must uncover the awful truth behind a car with a horrifying and murderous history. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and heaven help anyone who gets in Christine’s way…

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Death of a child from choking recounted
  • Death of a wife from suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning recounted
  • Murder
  • Car accidents (theme)
  • Bullying
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