The Prospects by K.T. Hoffman

Hope is familiar territory for Gene Ionescu. He has always loved baseball, a sport made for underdogs and optimists like him. He also loves his team, the minor league Beaverton Beavers, and, for the most part, he loves the career he’s built. As the first openly trans player in professional baseball, Gene has nearly everything he’s ever let himself dream of—that is, until Luis Estrada, Gene’s former teammate and current rival, gets traded to the Beavers, destroying the careful equilibrium of Gene’s life. Gene and Luis can’t manage a civil conversation off the field or a competent play on it, but in the close confines of dugout bench… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Transphobia mentioned
  • Anxiety

Wonderland by Jennifer Hillier

Welcome to Wonderland. By day, it’s a magical place boasting a certain retro charm. Excited children, hands sticky with cotton candy, run frenetically from the Giant Octopus ride to the Spinning Sombrero, while the tinkling carnival music of the giant Wonder Wheel—the oldest Ferris wheel in the Pacific Northwest—fills the air. But before daybreak, an eerie feeling descends. Maybe it’s the Clown Museum, home to creepy wax replicas of movie stars and a massive collection of antique porcelain dolls. Or maybe it’s the terrifyingly real House of Horrors. Or…maybe it’s the dead, decaying body left in the midway for all the Wonder Workers… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Transphobia & deadnaming
  • Fatphobia
  • Paedophilia & grooming
  • Child abuse (on-page)
  • Domestic violence
  • Drugging
  • Sexual assault & attempted rape (on-page)
  • Infidelity
  • Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
  • Death of a parent & spouse
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Abortion
  • School shooting mentioned

Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan

Olivia McAfee knows what it feels like to start over. Her picture-perfect life—living in Boston, married to a brilliant cardiothoracic surgeon, raising a beautiful son, Asher—was upended when her husband revealed a darker side. She never imagined she would end up back in her sleepy New Hampshire hometown, living in the house she grew up in, and taking over her father’s beekeeping business. Lily Campanello is familiar with do-overs, too. When she and her mom relocate to Adams, New Hampshire, for her final year of high school, they both hope it will be a fresh start. And for just a short while, these new beginnings… Read more,

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Transphobia & deadnaming
  • Physical & emotional domestic violence
  • Child abuse
  • Self-harm
  • Attempted suicide discussed
  • Abortion
  • Murder of a trans woman (theme)
  • Physical assault
  • Drunk driving car accident
  • Police brutality
  • Bullying

Godly Heathens by H.E. Edgmon

Gem Echols is a nonbinary Seminole teen living in the tiny town of Gracie, Georgia. Known for being their peers’ queer awakening, Gem leans hard on charm to disguise the anxious mess they are beneath. The only person privy to their authentic self is another trans kid, Enzo, who’s a thousand long, painful miles away in Brooklyn. But even Enzo doesn’t know about Gem’s dreams, haunting visions of magic and violence that have always felt too real. So how the hell does Willa Mae Hardy? The strange new girl in town acts like she and Gem are old companions, and seems to know things about them they’ve never told anyone.. Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism, slavery & genoicde mentioned
  • Transphobia
  • Child abuse
  • Domestic abuse, off-page
  • Hallucinations
  • Self-harm recounted
  • Blood, gore & body horror
  • Emesis
  • Torture
  • Animal death

Second Chances in New Port Stephen by TJ Alexander

Eli Ward hasn’t been back to his suffocating hometown of New Port Stephen, Florida, in ages. Post-transition and sober, he’s a completely different person from the one who left years ago. But when a scandal threatens his career as a TV writer and comedian, he has no choice but to return home for the holidays. He can only hope he’ll survive his boisterous, loving, but often misguided family and hide the fact that his dream of comedy success has become a nightmare. ust when he thinks this trip couldn’t get any worse, Eli bumps into his high school ex, Nick Wu, who’s somehow hotter than ever. Divorced and in his forties, Nick’s… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Homomisia & transmisia
  • Divorce recounted
  • Alcoholism recounted
  • Death of a parent recounted
  • Car accident recounted

Speak of the Devil by Rose Wilding

All of us knew him. One of us killed him… Seven women stand in shock in a seedy hotel room; a man’s severed head sits in the centre of the floor. Each of the women – the wife, the teenager, the ex, the journalist, the colleague, the friend, and the woman who raised him – has a very good reason to have done it, yet each swears she did not. In order to protect each other, they must figure out who is responsible, all while staying one step ahead of the police. Against the ticking clock of a murder investigation, each woman’s secret is brought to light as the connections between them converge to reveal a killer.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Transmisia & misgendering
  • Outing
  • Rape discussed
  • Adult-minor relationship & grooming
  • Domestic abuse
  • Infidelity
  • Suicide

These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong

A blood feud between two gangs runs the streets red, leaving the city helpless in the grip of chaos. At the heart of it all is eighteen-year-old Juliette Cai, a former flapper who has returned to assume her role as the proud heir of the Scarlet Gang—a network of criminals far above the law. Their only rivals in power are the White Flowers, who have fought the Scarlets for generations. And behind every move is their heir, Roma Montagov, Juliette’s first love… and first betrayal. But when gangsters on both sides show signs of instability culminating in clawing their own throats… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Transmisia
  • Self-harm
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Graphic blood & gore depiction
  • Murder
  • Kidnapping

Zhara by S. Jae-Jones

Magic is forbidden throughout the Morning Realms. Magicians are called abomination, and blamed for the plague of monsters that razed the land twenty years before.

Jin Zhara already had enough to worry about—appease her stepmother’s cruel whims, looking after her blind younger sister, and keeping her own magical gifts under control—without having to deal with rumors of monsters re-emerging in the marsh. But when a chance encounter with… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Ableism
  • Homomisia
  • Transmisia & misgendering
  • Child abuse
  • Body horror
  • Emesis
  • Loss of autonomy (possession)

This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel

This is how a family keeps a secret and how that secret ends up keeping them. This is how a family lives happily ever after until happily ever after becomes complicated. This is how children change and then change the world. This is Claude. He’s five years old, the youngest of five brothers, and loves peanut butter sandwiches. He also loves wearing a dress, and dreams of being a princess. When he grows up, Claude says, he wants to be a girl. Rosie and Penn want Claude to be whoever Claude wants to be. They’re just not sure they’re ready to share that with the world. Soon the entire family is keeping Claude’s secret. Until one day it explodes.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Transmisia
  • Homomisia
  • Self-harm mentioned
  • Suicide mentioned
  • Cancer
  • Bullying

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

Shots rang out in Savannah’s grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. John Berendt’s narrative reads like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and yet it is a work of nonfiction. Berendt interweaves a first-person account of life in this isolated remnant of the Old South with the unpredictable twists and turns of a landmark murder case. The story is peopled by a gallery of remarkable characters: the well… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism & racial slurs
  • Homomisia
  • Transmisia
  • Blood depiction
  • Murder
  • Gun violence