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Gemma

Meg Tilly · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

Daddy Love

Joyce Carol Oates · 279 pages

Part-time preacher Chester Cash calls himself Daddy Love. He has abducted, tortured, and raped several young boys into being his lover and his 'son'. Kidnapping Robbie from his mother at a mall, he confines the child in a small box and gradually brainwashes him over subsequent years into believing that they are father and son. Dinah, the boy's mother, who was savagely injured during the abduction,

Child AbuseSexual Assault ContentKidnapping PlotBleak
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A Stolen Life

Jaycee Dugard · 273 pages

In the summer of 1991 I was a normal kid. I did normal things. I had friends and a mother who loved me. I was just like you. Until the day my life was stolen. For eighteen years I was a prisoner. I was an object for someone to use and abuse. For eighteen years I was not allowed to speak my own name. I became a mother and was forced to be a sister. For eighteen years I survived an impossible

Child AbuseSexual Assault ContentKidnapping PlotIntense
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Room

Emma Donoghue · 322 pages

To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world.... Told in the inventive, funny, and poignant voice of Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience—and a powerful story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At n

Child AbuseSexual Assault ContentKidnapping PlotIntense
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Living Dead Girl

Elizabeth Scott · 184 pages

Kidnapping PlotSexual Assault ContentChild AbuseBleak
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A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara · 736 pages

Child AbuseSexual Assault ContentIntenseDark
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Gerald's Game

Stephen King · 400 pages

An erotic game with handcuffs between husband and wife. One of them won't make it through the night. For the survivor, death would have been a blessing.

Child AbuseSexual Assault ContentBleakDark
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Mystic River

Dennis Lehane · 487 pages

When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled up to their street. One boy got into the car, two did not, and something terrible happened -- something that ended their friendship and changed all three boys forever. Twenty-five years later, Sean is a homicide detective. Jimmy is an ex-con who owns a corner store. And Dave is trying to

Child AbuseSexual Assault ContentBleakKidnapping Plot
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My Absolute Darling

Gabriel Tallent · 464 pages

A brilliant and immersive, all-consuming read about one fourteen-year-old girl's heart-stopping fight for her own soul.Turtle Alveston is a survivor. At fourteen, she roams the woods along the northern California coast. The creeks, tide pools, and rocky islands are her haunts and her hiding grounds, and she is known to wander for miles. But while her physical world is expansive, her personal one i

Child AbuseSexual Assault ContentIntenseDark
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Nicholas Dane

Melvin Burgess · 408 pages

When Nick's mother dies unexpectedly, the 14 year old is sent straight into a boy's home. There he learns that violence and intimidation keep order. The deputy head Mr Creal grooms Nick with sweets and solace until he can take no more and escapes into a life of crime with a modern Fagin and cheeful boy named Rasta.

Child AbuseSexual Assault ContentBleakDark
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Let's Go Play At The Adams'

Mendal W. Johnson · 282 pages

Child AbuseKidnapping PlotSexual Assault ContentDark
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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 AbuseSexual Assault ContentBleakDark
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Identical

Ellen Hopkins · 624 pages

Do twins begin in the womb? Or in a better place? Kaeleigh and Raeanne are identical down to the dimple. As daughters of a district-court judge father and a politician mother, they are an all-American family—on the surface. Behind the facade each sister has her own dark secret, and that's where their differences begin. For Kaeleigh, she's the misplaced focus of Daddy's love, intended for a

Child AbuseSexual Assault ContentIntenseBleak
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Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

Flora Rheta Schreiber · 460 pages

This is the amazing story of a woman who lived with 16 different personalities. Here is the unbelievable yet true story of Sybil Dorsett, a survivor of terrible childhood abuse who as an adult was a victim of sudden and mysterious blackouts. What happened during those blackouts has made Sybil's experience one of the most famous psychological cases in the world.

Sexual Assault ContentChild AbuseIntenseBleak
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Push

Sapphire · 176 pages

Precious Jones, an illiterate sixteen-year-old, has up until now been invisible: invisible to the father who rapes her and the mother who batters her and to the authorities who dismiss her as just one more of Harlem's casualties. But when Precious, pregnant with a second child by her father, meets a determined and highly radical teacher, we follow her on a journey of education and enlightenment as

Child AbuseSexual Assault ContentBleakTeen Protagonist
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The Butterfly Garden

Dot Hutchison · 333 pages

"Near an isolated mansion lies a beautiful garden. In this garden grow luscious flowers, shady trees...and a collection of precious butterflies -- young women who have been kidnapped and intricately tattooed to resemble their namesakes. Overseeing it all is the Gardener, a brutal, twisted man obsessed with capturing and preserving his lovely specimens. When the garden is discovered, a survivor is

Kidnapping PlotSexual Assault ContentIntenseDark
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Finding Me: A Decade of Darkness, a Life Reclaimed - A Memoir of the Cleveland Kidnappings

Michelle Knight, Michelle Burford · 252 pages

Describes the details of the abduction and decade-long captivity of one of the three survivors of notorious Cleveland kidnapper Ariel Castro, and how she found the courage to endure unimaginable circumstances and never lose hope for the future.

Sexual Assault ContentKidnapping PlotChild AbuseIntense
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The Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead · 416 pages

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, 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 youn

Sexual Assault ContentIntenseBleakDark
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Captive in the Dark

C.J. Roberts · 206 pages

The Dark Duet #1 WARNING: This book contains very disturbing situations, dubious consent, strong language, and graphic violence. Caleb is a man with a singular interest in revenge. Kidnapped as a young boy and sold into slavery by a power-hungry mobster, he has thought of nothing but vengeance. For twelve years he has immersed himself in the world of pleasure slaves searching for the one man h

Sexual Assault ContentKidnapping PlotIntenseDark
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When We Were Silent

Fiona McPhillips · 320 pages

Child AbuseIntenseSexual Assault ContentDark
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The House with the Blind Glass Windows

Herbjorg Wassmo · 227 pages

Child AbuseSexual Assault ContentBleakDark
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Stolen: A Letter to My Captor

Lucy Christopher · 301 pages

Gemma, a British city-living teenager, is kidnapped while on holiday with her parents. Her kidnapper, Ty, takes her to the wild land of outback Australia. To Gemma's city-eyes, the landscape is harsh and unforgiving and there are no other signs of human life for hundreds of kilometres in every direction. Here, there is no escape. Gemma must learn to deal with her predicament, or die trying to figh

Kidnapping PlotIntenseDarkBleak
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NOS4A2

Joe Hill · 706 pages

Victoria McQueen has a secret gift for finding things: a misplaced bracelet, a missing photography, answers to unanswerable questions. On her Raleigh Tuff Burner bike, she makes her way to a rickety covered bridge that, within moments, takes her wherever she needs to go, whether it's across Massachusetts or across the country. Charles Talent Manx has a way with children. He likes to take them for

Kidnapping PlotIntenseChild AbuseDark
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Parable of the Talents

Octavia E. Butler · 420 pages

Environmental devastation and economic chaos have turned America into a land of depravity. Taking advantage of the situation, a zealous bigot wins his way into the White House. Lauren Olamina leads a new faith group directly opposed to the new government. This is the story of the group's struggle to preserve its vision. As the government turns a blind eye to the violent bigots who consider a bl

IntenseSexual Assault ContentKidnapping PlotBleak
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Gather the Daughters

Jennie Melamed · 341 pages

Just before the country was incinerated to wasteland, ten men and their families colonized an island off the coast. They built a radical society of ancestor worship, controlled breeding, and the strict rationing of knowledge and history. Only the Wanderers-- chosen male descendants of the original ten-- are allowed to cross to the wastelands. At the first sign of puberty, their daughters face thei

Child AbuseSexual Assault ContentBleakDark

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