Top Ten Tuesdays #5 Ten Tough Topics!

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by the lovelies at The Broke and the Bookish. 

This week’s (rather alliterative)Top Ten theme is: TOP TEN BOOKS WHICH TACKLE TOUGH TOPICS.

So here they are, in no particular order!

       

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time makes it onto yet another Top 10! This book dealt wonderfully with the idea of Aspergers and how a family copes with a difficult situation. 

Room is a phenomenal read which deals with kidnap, abuse, depression, identity and the complicated relationship between a mother and son in a horrible circumstance.

You can read my full review here.

Doll is a hauntingly beautiful piece of YA Literature which deals with identity and matriarchal estrangement. You can read my full review of this mesmerising text here.

       

When a brother and sister are the soul carers of their family, when they are forced to behave like parents, they find their feelings turning to more than just sibling love. This is a book that both turned my stomach and yet also left me routing for the pair even though their love was impossible from the word "go".

   

A Note Of Madness, and A Voice in the Distance are a beautiful duet. Suzuma writes about bipolar with cutting realism and finesse. She brings to light the traumatic loss of control that comes with the illness and creates a tremendous amount of empathy for her protagonists.

I bawled my eyes out. This book deals with the heartbreaking sadness and inevitability of incurable cancer in such a poignant and poetic way. I've read this book five times and sobbed every time. 

I teach this as part of GCSE English "Other Cultures" and love doing so. Angelou has such strength and is brutally honest about many tough subjects in this first of five autobiographical memoires. She tackles familial estrangement, rape and racism among the every day trials of being raised a black girl in the segregated Southern states. 

I read this book after watching the movie adaptation, "Precious". This is such a powerful text. It deals with incest, familial abuse, illiteracy, identity crisis, teenage pregnancy and a whole mess of other issues. It's so hard to see a light at the end of the tunnel for Sapphire's protagonist. She deals with the subject mater in a brutally moving way. 

  I read this one recently and its darkness is still fluttering about inside my head. Clarke deals with the traumas of self harm, teen pregnancy, betrayals of trust and suicide in a way that is sure not to glamorise them. Being a teenager sounds like its even tougher now than it was for this 26 year old blogger! You can read my full review of this book here.
 

This took a whole bunch of brain-wracking! Huge thanks to The Broke and the Bookish for keeping my brain in gear every Tuesday!

Lx