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Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

Tricks

Ellen Hopkins · 627 pages

Five teenagers find themselves stuck in a horrifying wold of sexual slavery

Human TraffickingChild AbuseChildhood TraumaBleak
❤️

One of the Boys

Daniel Magariel · 172 pages

"A riveting and emotionally harrowing debut about two young brothers and their physically and psychologically abusive father--One of the Boys is 160 perfect, stunning pages by a major new talent. The three of them--a twelve-year-old boy, his older brother, their father--have won the war: the father's term for his bitter divorce and custody battle. They leave their Kansas home and drive through the

Child AbuseChildhood TraumaChild NarratorBleak
❤️

Bastard Out of Carolina

Dorothy Allison · 309 pages

Bone, an illegitimate child in a family of social outcasts, sees her mother's happiness with her new husband and will not tell when the stepfather begins abusing her in the 1950s.

Child AbuseChild NarratorToxic Family DynamicsChildhood Trauma
❤️

The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison · 181 pages

Each night Pecola prayed for blue eyes. In her eleven years, no one had ever noticed Pecola. But with blue eyes, she thought, everything would be different. She would be so pretty that her parents would stop fighting. Her father would stop drinking. Her brother would stop running away. If only she could be beautiful. If only people would look at her. When someone finally did, it was her fath

Child AbuseChildhood TraumaBleakToxic Family Dynamics
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Viper in the fist

Herve Bazin · 183 pages

Child AbuseChildhood TraumaChild NarratorToxic Family Dynamics
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Ham on Rye

Charles Bukowski · 288 pages

In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D. H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye of

Child AbuseChildhood TraumaToxic Family DynamicsBleak
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The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things

J.T. LeRoy · 251 pages

Circulated copies of LeRoy's handwritten notebook pages brought early attention to the then unpublished author. In print for the first time, these loosely connected autobiographical stories describe the harrowing experiences of a young boy's life on the run. From the heartbreaking "Meteor," where he struggles for the attention of his wandering mother, to the paranoia of "Coal"-'Whenever things fee

Child AbuseBleakToxic Family DynamicsChild Narrator
❤️

Fifth Born

Zelda Lockhart · 210 pages

**Fifth Born** When Odessa Blackburn is three years old, she sees her grandmother for the last time, and so begins her story as the fifth born of eight children in a troubled family. Molested by her father, Odessa is also the sole witness to a murder he commits. Her mother guards both secrets and joins her husband in ostracizing their fifth born from the rest of her siblings. As Odessa grows,

Child AbuseChildhood TraumaToxic Family DynamicsChild Narrator
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The Education of Dixie Dupree

Donna Everhart · 352 pages

Child AbuseToxic Family DynamicsChildhood TraumaChild Narrator
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Surrender

Sonya Hartnett

BleakToxic Family DynamicsChildhood TraumaChild Abuse
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Sharp Objects

Gillian Flynn · 297 pages

WICKED above her hipbone, GIRL across her heart Words are like a road map to reporter Camille Preaker's troubled past. Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, Camille's first assignment from the second-rate daily paper where she works brings her reluctantly back to her hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls.NASTY on her kneecap, BABYDOLL on her legSince she left town eight years a

BleakChild AbuseChildhood TraumaToxic Family Dynamics
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Me And Emma

Elizabeth Flock · 301 pages

In many ways, Carrie Parker is like any other eight-year-old—playing make-believe, dreading school, dreaming of faraway places.But even her imagination can't shut out the realities of her impoverished North Carolina home or help her protect her younger sister, Emma.As the big sister, Carrie is determined to do anything to keep Emma safe from a life of neglect and abuse at the hands of their drunke

Child AbuseToxic Family DynamicsChildhood TraumaChild Narrator
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Three Strong Women

Marie NDiaye · 277 pages

Forty-year-old Norah leaves Paris, her family and her career as a lawyer to visit her father in Dakar. It is an uncomfortable reunion - she is asked to use her skills as a lawyer to get her brother out of prison - and ultimately the trip endangers her marriage and her relationship with her own daughter, and drives her to the very edge of madness. Fanta, on the other hand, leaves Dakar to follow he

Refugee ExperienceToxic Family DynamicsImmigrationBleak
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Affliction

Russell Banks · 355 pages

Wade Whitehouse is an unlikely protagonist of a tragedy. Wade looms in one's mind as a bluecollar American Everyman afflicted by the dark secret of the macho tradition, his tale told by his articulate, equally-scarred younger brother. "Part thriller, part psychological study, part indictment of the American way of violence." Wade Whitehouse is an improbable protagonist for a tragedy. A well-digger

BleakChildhood TraumaToxic Family DynamicsChild Abuse
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A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaled Hosseini · 416 pages

After 103 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and with four million copies of The Kite Runner shipped, Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most important literary writers today. Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an

Refugee ExperienceChild AbuseBleakToxic Family Dynamics
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One Foot Wrong

Sofie Laguna · 249 pages

A brilliant first novel of profound depth, startling originality and breathtaking talent.A child is imprisoned in a house by her reclusive religious parents. Hester has never seen the outside world; her companions are Cat, Spoon, Door, Handle, Broom, and they all speak to her. Her imagination is informed by one book, an illustrated child's bible, and its imagery forms the sole basis for her capaci

Child AbuseBleakChildhood TraumaChild Narrator
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Such a Pretty Girl

Laura Wiess · 224 pages

Haunted by flashbacks, fifteen-year-old Meredith learns that three years in prison has not changed the abusive father who molested her.

Child AbuseChildhood TraumaBleakToxic Family Dynamics
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You Were Never Really Here

Jonathan Ames · 93 pages

Joe has witnessed things that cannot be erased. A former FBI agent and Marine, his abusive childhood has left him damaged beyond repair. He has completely withdrawn from the world and earns his living rescuing girls who have been kidnapped into the sex trade. When he's hired to save the daughter of a corrupt New York senator held captive at a Manhattan brothel, he stumbles into a dangerous web of

Human TraffickingChildhood TraumaChild AbuseDark
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Try

Dennis Cooper · 199 pages

**From Goodreads:** Ziggy is the adopted teenaged son of two sexually abusive fathers, from whose obsessive attentions he flees into the weird world of his uncle, an amoral man who makes violent pornography. As scenes of fierce sex and sadistic oppression take place around him, Ziggy falls improbably in love -- with his best friend, a junkie. Dennis Cooper, author of the gay horror classic Fris

Child AbuseChildhood TraumaBleakDark
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The Kid

Sapphire · 378 pages

Fifteen years after the publication of Push, Sapphire gives voice to Abdul Jones, the son of her unforgettable heroine, Precious. The Kid is an electrifying story of body and spirit, rooted in the hungers of flesh and of the soul, bringing us deep into the interior life of Abdul. We meet him at age nine, on the day of his mother's funeral. Left alone to navigate in a world where love and hate some

Child AbuseChildhood TraumaBleakDark
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Sold

Patricia McCormick · 272 pages

Lakshmi is a thirteen-year-old girl who lives with her family in a small hut in the mountains of Nepal. Her family is desperately poor, but her life is full of simple pleasures, like raising her black-and-white speckled goat, and having her mother brush her hair by the light of an oil lamp. But when the harsh Himalayan monsoons wash away all that remains of the family’s crops, Lakshmi’s stepfather

Human TraffickingChild AbuseBleakDark
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The Notebook

Agota Kristof · 160 pages

BleakChild AbuseChild NarratorDark
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The Darkest Child

Delores Phillips · 392 pages

Pakersfield, Georgia, 1958: Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn is the sixth of ten fatherless siblings. She is the darkest-skinned among them and therefore the ugliest in her mother, Rozelle’s, estimation, but she’s also the brightest. Rozelle—beautiful, charismatic, and light-skinned—exercises a violent hold over her children. Fearing abandonment, she pulls them from school at the age of twelve an

Child AbuseBleakChild NarratorToxic Family Dynamics
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Joe

Larry Brown · 348 pages

Toxic Family DynamicsChild AbuseBleakLiterary Fiction

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