Tag Archives: Substance Addiction

The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer

Years ago, a reclusive mega-bestselling children’s author quit writing under mysterious circumstances. Suddenly he resurfaces with a brand-new book and a one-of-a-kind competition, offering a prize that will change the winner’s life in this absorbing and whimsical novel.

Lucy Hart knows better than anyone what it’s like to grow up without parents who loved her. In a childhood marked by neglect and loneliness, Lucy found her solace in books, namely the Clock Island series by Jack Masterson… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Parental abandonment
  • Child abuse and neglect recounted
  • Foster care experiences
  • Emotionally abusive relationship recounted
  • Munchausen by Proxy mentioned*
  • Alcoholism and substance addiction recovery (love interest)
  • Alcohol consumption & abuse
  • Unplanned pregnancy & miscarriage mentioned
  • Sibling with terminal cancer
  • Death of a brother from complications during heart surgery recounted
  • Financial and housing insecurity

*Context: The protagonist learns her sister’s childhood chronic illness was the result of her parents’ attempts to keep her sick. Discussions of children in foster care due to abusive alcoholic parents and parents’ deaths from overdoses.

The Many Lives of Mama Love by Lara Love Hardin

No one expects the police to knock on the million-dollar, two-story home of the perfect cul-de-sac housewife. But soccer mom Lara Love Hardin has been hiding a shady she is funding her heroin addiction by stealing her neighbors’ credit cards. Lara is convicted of thirty-two felonies and becomes inmate S32179. She learns that jail is a class system with a power structure that is somewhere between an adolescent sleepover party and Lord of the Flies . Furniture is made from tampon boxes and Snickers bars are… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Foster care
  • Substance addiction
  • Drug use & abuse
  • Drugging
  • Hospitalisation
  • Incarceration for drug offences

Context: Hardin’s husband injected drugs into her IV when she was hospitalised. Her efforts toward sobriety were motivated by regaining custody of her sons who were placed in the foster care system.

Beautifully Broken by Megan Bates

There is a feral side of me always lying dormant until I have someone pretty to ruin.
I could corrupt him so easily; I could make him understand what it’s like to play with the devil. I could make him find new meanings to the words
“Beautifully Broken “
This one isn’t leaving.
I’m going to make him need me, and only me, no matter what It takes.
I haven’t laid my eyes on such a pretty boy in so long
Until him… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Consensual nonconsent/rape play
  • Dubious consent scenarios including improper BDSM practices
  • Child abuse recounted
  • Cheating mentioned
  • Depression
  • Panic attacks
  • Substance addiction
  • Suicide discussed
  • Self-harm
  • Knife play
  • Kidnapping

Deep in Providence by Riss M. Neilson

For best friends Miliani, Inez, Natalie and Jasmine, Providence, Rhode Island has a magic of its own. From the bodegas and late-night food trucks on Broad Street to The Hill that watches over the city, every corner of Providence glows with memories of them practicing spells, mixing up potions and doing séances with the help of the magic Miliani’s Filipino grandfather taught her.

But when Jasmine is killed by a drunk driver, the world they have always known is left haunted… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Sexism
  • Religious bigotry & trauma
  • Sexual harassment
  • Child abandonment
  • Anxiety
  • Parent with substance addiction
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Drug use & abuse
  • Overdose
  • Pregnancy
  • Abortion
  • Forced institutionalisation mentioned
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a parent
  • Car accident, off-page
  • Deportation mentioned

The Packing House by G. Donald Cribbs

When 16-year-old Joel Scrivener has a raging nightmare in study hall and someone records it on their phone, he awakens to a living nightmare where everyone knows his secret, one that he’s suppressed for ten years. Reeling as the whole school finds out the truth, Joel takes to the woods, leaving the bullies and his broken home behind. However, life as a runaway isn’t easy, as Joel’s hallucinations and nightmares follow him into the wilderness. To stop them once and for all, he pieces clues together with flashes of the images that play endlessly inside his head – will he figure out the identity of the person who caused his nightmare before it’s too late?

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Homomisia
  • Graphic sexual assault of a child
  • Domestic abuse
  • Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
  • Substance & gambling addiction
  • Bullying
  • Homelessness

The Remaking by Clay McLeod Chapman

Ella Louise has lived in the woods surrounding Pilot’s Creek, Virginia, for nearly a decade. Publicly, she and her daughter Jessica are shunned by their upper-crust family and the Pilot’s Creek residents. Privately, desperate townspeople visit her apothecary for a cure to what ails them—until Ella Louise is blamed for the death of a prominent customer. Accused of witchcraft, both mother and daughter are burned at the stake in the middle of the night. Ella Louise’s burial site is never found, but the little girl has the most famous grave in the South: a steel-reinforced coffin surrounded by a fence of interconnected white crosses… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Suicide
  • Substance addiction
  • Alcoholism
  • Immolation
  • Bullying

Do I Know You? by Sarah Strohmeyer

Jane Ellison is a “super recognizer” able to identify strangers by the slightest facial details—the curve of a head, the arch of an eyebrow. When she spies human rights activist and heiress Bella Valencia in a crowded Boston airport, Jane’s convinced she’s found the person responsible for her sister Kit’s disappearance and presumed death eleven years earlier. But her attempt to detain the suspect ends with Jane herself fired and humiliated… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Substance addiction

Love on the Lake by Helena Hunting

Teagan Firestone has always been the dutiful daughter, especially since her mom died. But as her father finally begins to move on, it’s her turn to do the same. Her destination: Pearl Lake, a close-knit community with an entrepreneurial spirit and secrets of its own.

One of them is Aaron Saunders, who dropped out of college to work construction for Pearl Lake’s upper class. He’s a mystery and has a playboy reputation—that is, until he meets Teagan. Neither of them is looking for love, but in a town this small, it’s hard not to let your heart get involved… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Anxiety
  • Substance addiction
  • Death of a mother recounted

96 Words for Love by Rachel Roy and Ava Dash

Ever since her acceptance to UCLA, 17-year-old Raya Liston has been quietly freaking out. She feels simultaneously lost and trapped by a future already mapped out for her. Then her beloved grandmother dies, and Raya jumps at the chance to spend her last free summer at the ashram in India where her grandmother met and fell in love with her grandfather. Raya hopes to find her centre and her true path. But she didn’t expect to fall in love… with a country of beautiful contradictions, her fiercely loyal cousin, a local girl with a passion for reading, and a boy who teaches her that in Sanskrit, there are 96 different… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Forced public outing
  • Sex trafficking
  • Arranged marriage mentioned
  • Addiction recovery
  • Suicide
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Disappearance & kidnapping of a child

Wildfire by Hannah Grace

Maple Hills students Russ Callaghan and Aurora Roberts cross paths at a party celebrating the end of the academic year, where a drinking game results in them having a passionate one-night stand. Never one to overstay her welcome (or expect much from a man), Aurora slips away before Russ even has the chance to ask for her full name. Imagine their surprise when they bump into each other on the first day of the summer camp where they are both counsellors, hoping to escape their complicated home lives by spending the summer working. Russ hopes if he gets far enough away from Maple Hills, he can avoid deal… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Parental abandonment
  • Parent with alcoholism and gambling addiction