What Momma Left Me by Renée Watson

What Momma Left Me by Renée Watson

How is it that unsavory raw ingredients come together to form a delicious cake? What is it about life that when you take all the hard stuff and rough stuff and add in a lot of love, you still just might have a wonderful life?

For Serenity, these questions rise up early when her father kills her mother, and leaves her and her brother Danny to live with their kind but strict grandparents. Despite the difficulties of a new school, a new church, and a new neighborhood, Serenity gains strength from the family around her, the new friends she finds, and her own careful optimism.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Domestic violence
  • Sexual assault mentioned
  • Suicide mentioned
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a mother recounted
  • Gun violence
  • Poverty themes
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Suicide Notes from Beautiful Girls by Lynn Weingarten

Suicide Notes from Beautiful Girls by Lynn Weingarten

They say Delia burned herself to death in her stepfather’s shed. They say it was suicide. But June doesn’t believe it.

June and Delia used to be closer than anything. Best friends in that way that comes before everyone else—before guys, before family. It was like being in love, but more. They had a billion secrets, binding them together like thin silk cords.

But one night a year ago, everything changed. June, Delia, and June’s boyfriend Ryan were just having a little fun. Their good time got out of hand. And in the cold blue light of morning, June knew only this—things would never be the same again.

And now, a year later, Delia is dead. June is certain she was murdered. And she owes it to her to find out the truth…which is far more complicated than she ever could have imagined.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Rape
  • Toxic relationships
  • Cheating
  • Suicide
  • Murder
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Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells

Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells

SciFi’s favorite antisocial A.I. is again on a mission. The case against the too-big-to-fail GrayCris Corporation is floundering, and more importantly, authorities are beginning to ask more questions about where Dr. Mensah’s SecUnit is.

And Murderbot would rather those questions went away. For good.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Self-sacrifice
  • Physical injuries
  • Murder & attempted murder
  • Gun violence
  • Loss of autonomy discussed
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Loveboat, Taipei by Abigail Hing Wen

Loveboat, Taipei by Abigail Hing Wen

When eighteen-year-old Ever Wong’s parents send her from Ohio to Taiwan to study Mandarin for the summer, she finds herself thrust among the very over-achieving kids her parents have always wanted her to be, including Rick Woo, the Yale-bound prodigy profiled in the Chinese newspapers since they were nine—and her parents’ yardstick for her never-measuring-up life.

Unbeknownst to her parents, however, the program is actually an infamous teen meet-market nicknamed Loveboat, where the kids are more into clubbing than calligraphy and drinking snake-blood sake than touring sacred shrines.

Free for the first time, Ever sets out to break all her parents’ uber-strict rules—but how far can she go before she breaks her own heart?

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism
  • Slut shaming
  • Revenge porn*
  • Abusive relationship
  • Cheating
  • Depression
  • Suicidal ideation & suicide recounted
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Emesis
  • Blood depiction

*Note: Release of nude photographs without consent.

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On the Fence by Kasie West

On the Fence by Kasie West

For sixteen-year-old Charlotte Reynolds, aka Charlie, being raised by a single dad and three older brothers has its perks. She can outrun, outscore, and outwit every boy she knows—including her longtime neighbour and honorary fourth brother, Braden. But when it comes to being a girl, Charlie doesn’t know the first thing about anything. So when she starts working at chichi boutique to pay off a speeding ticket, she finds herself in a strange new world of makeup, lacy skirts, and BeDazzlers. Even stranger, she’s spending time with a boy who has never seen her tear it up in a pickup game. To cope with the stress of faking… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Child abuse
  • Death of a mother from suicide by car accident

The One by John Marrs

The One by John Marrs

How far would you go to find The One? A simple DNA test is all it takes. Just a quick mouth swab and soon you’ll be matched with your perfect partner–the one you’re genetically made for.

That’s the promise made by Match Your DNA. A decade ago, the company announced that they had found the gene that pairs each of us with our soul mate. Since then, millions of people around the world have been matched. But the discovery has its downsides: test results have led to the breakup of countless relationships and upended the traditional ideas of dating, romance and love.

Now five very different people have received the notification that they’ve been “Matched.” They’re each about to meet their one true love. But “happily ever after” isn’t guaranteed for everyone. Because even soul mates have secrets. And some are more shocking than others… 

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Cheating
  • Suicide
  • Infertility
  • Childbirth & death during childbirth
  • Miscarriages mentioned
  • Terminal illness & cancer
  • Coma
  • Aneurysm
  • Eyeball trauma
  • Death of an infant
  • Death of a spouse
  • Murder, and attempted murder of a pregnant woman
  • Strangulation
  • Kidnapping, including the abduction of an infant
  • Stalking
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The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Kiersten White

The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankentstein by Kiersten White

Elizabeth Lavenza hasn’t had a proper meal in weeks. Her thin arms are covered with bruises from her “caregiver,” and she is on the verge of being thrown into the streets . . . until she is brought to the home of Victor Frankenstein, an unsmiling, solitary boy who has everything–except a friend.

Victor is her escape from misery. Elizabeth does everything she can to make herself indispensable–and it works. She is taken in by the Frankenstein family and rewarded with a warm bed, delicious food, and dresses of the finest silk. Soon she and Victor are inseparable.

But her new life comes at a price. As the years pass, Elizabeth’s survival depends on managing Victor’s dangerous temper and entertaining his every whim, no matter how depraved. Behind her blue eyes and sweet smile lies the calculating heart of a girl determined to stay alive no matter the cost . . . as the world she knows is consumed by darkness.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Ableism & ableist language
  • Classism
  • Misogyny
  • Slut shaming
  • Graphic physical, verbal & emotional abuse
  • Parental abandonment
  • Intimate partner abuse & violence
  • Nightmares
  • Self-sacrifice (on-page) & suicidal ideation mentioned
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Nonconsensual drugging
  • Graphic blood & gore depiction
  • Graphic dead bodies & body parts
  • Graphic physical injuries & wound descriptions
  • Graphic medical procedures & experiments
  • Emesis
  • Forced hospitalisation
  • Body horror
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a mother recounted
  • Death of an uncle (off-page)
  • Death of a friend
  • Death of a child
  • Death of a brother
  • Murder & attempted murder
  • Gun violence
  • Graphic strangulation
  • Hanging (off-page)
  • Fire (multiple scenes)
  • Kidnapping & captivity
  • Building collapse
  • Stalking
  • Graphic animal abuse (on-page) & animal death
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The Underground Railway by Colson Whitehead

The Underground Railway by Colson Whitehead

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When a recent arrival from Virginia tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey—hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism & racial slurs
  • White supremacy & the Klu Klux Klan
  • Slavery
  • Rape & sexual assault
  • Paedophilia
  • Domestic violence
  • PTSD
  • Suicide & attempted suicide
  • Sterilization
  • Murder
  • Lynching
  • Whipping
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The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Dorian Gray is a beautiful yet corrupt man. When he wishes that a perfect portrait of himself would bear the signs of ageing in his place, the picture becomes his hideous secret, as it follows Dorian’s own downward spiral into cruelty and depravity.

Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life; indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Ableism
  • Misogyny
  • Suicide
  • Murder
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Nailbiter Vol. 1: There Will Be Blood by Joshua Williamson & Mike Henderson

Nailbiter, Vol. 1: There Will Be Blood by Joshua Williamson & Mike Henderson

“Where do serial killers come from?” and why has Buckaroo, Oregon given birth to sixteen of the most vile serial killers in the world?

NSA Agent Nicholas Finch needs to solve that mystery in order to save his friend, and he’ll have to team up with the infamous Edward “Nailbiter” Warren to do it.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Sexual harassment
  • Suicide mentioned & on-page attempted suicide
  • Graphic blood & gore depiction
  • Hospital
  • Cannibalism
  • Dismemberment & amputation
  • Nonconsensual body modifications
  • Murder & attempted murder
  • Torture
  • Gun violence
  • Knife violence & stabbing
  • Hanging
  • Kidnapping
  • Imprisonment
  • Fire
  • Graphic animal dead bodies
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