“Loving someone was traumatizing. You never knew what would happen to them out there in the world. Everything precious was also vulnerable.” For Penny Lee, high school was lackluster at best. Her grades were fine, her friends were fine, and her boyfriend was fine. However, it’s finally time for her to leave home and go…
Tag: Trigger Warning: Rape
Peach Blossom Spring by Melissa Fu
“She does not belong to the Japanese, the Imperialists, the foreigners who rolled into Shanghai. She is not the warlords’, the emperors’ or the Americans’. She is for the Chinese people. One people, one country.” In 1938, Meilin’s future seemed bright, but with the Japanese army approaching, she is forced to flee her home with…
Kings Rising by C.S. Pacat
“You’ve spent a morning with him and you’re warning me off. Just wait,’ said Damen, ‘until you’ve spent a full day with him.’‘You mean that he improves with time?’‘Not exactly,’ said Damen.” Now that Damen’s identity has been revealed, he must face Laurent as the person Laurent hates most in the world. On the brink…
The Bone Orchard by Sara A. Mueller
“Men did not respect anger in a woman. They labeled it weakness.” Charm is the last of a line of necromantic workers. Captured by the enemy and forced to operate a pleasure house, with each of her “children” a worker. Grown from the bone trees in the yard, her children each harbor a fragment of…
Captive Prince by C.S. Pacat
“Damen’s understanding of Laurent rearranged itself, in order that he might despise him more accurately.” Damen, is a warrior prince and a hero to his people, but when his half-brother seizes power he is stripped of his identity and sent to an enemy nation as a pleasure slave. His beautiful, manipulative, and deadly new master,…
The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
“I thought: We’re going to survive—our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We’ll be in their dreams—and in their worst nightmares too.” Briseis was the queen of one…
The Burning God by R.F. Kuang
“She was a goddess. She was a monster. She‘d nearly destroyed this country. And then she‘d given it one last, gasping chance to live.” After saving her nation of Nikan from foreign invaders and battling the evil Empress Su Daji in a brutal civil war, Fang Runin was betrayed by allies and left for dead….
Grass by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim
“I’ve never known happiness from the moment I came out of my mother’s womb.” Grass is a powerful antiwar graphic novel, telling the life story of a Korean girl named Ok-Sun Lee who was forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese Imperial Army during WWII. The story starts in Lee’s childhood, showing the lead-up to…
Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko
“I’ve never understood why mortals make things so complicated. Am’s story for men and women has always been simple: You are equals, built to work side by side. But when it comes to power, mortals have always loathed simplicity.” Tarisai always longed for the warmth of a family, but was raised by a mysterious, often…
The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna
“Our whole lives, we’ve been taught to make ourselves smaller, weaker than me. That’s what the Infinite Wisdoms teaches — that being a girl means perpetual submission.” In Otera, every sixteen-year-old girl lives in both fear and anticipation of the blood ceremony that will determine whether she will become a member of her village or…
The Great Book Wyrm 