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McDermott seems interested in writing about degrees of marginality, of guilt, and of goodness. The women endure their husbands' sexist jokes and the patronizing attitudes of male doctors they often work alongside in their mission to provide relief to the ill; yet they themselves tend to otherize the Vietnamese people, despite their best intentions. And of course there's the bigger picture: the reason the Americans are "cocooned" in the country in the first place is an unstable mixture of quixoti

While individual moments are well-observed and full of empathy and life—like the description of the high schoolers walking side by side down the street "incandescent with jokes and laughter, five lit bulbs on a string"—each story is greater than the sum of its parts. They build and build to the point that they defy categorization. Brinkley's style is a worthy vehicle for his wide-ranging sensibility, sliding from conversational play ("headassery" describes Headass' awkward behavior)

This blood-and-tears detective thriller explores the complications, even contradictions, that social progress and the restructuring of power bring— complications not everyone has to face equally. All the Sinners Bleed is both an exciting thrill ride and an enriching meditation on race, authority, hate, and faith in America.

Part biography and part investigative journalism, The Forgotten Girls is dense yet very readable, balancing engaging storytelling and pathos on the one hand with enlightening social science on the other. In fewer than 300 pages, Potts imparts the facts of several complicated social ills like fundamentalist power structures, the opioid epidemic, and America's educational and racial caste systems, while also illustrating what it's like to be caught up in them through the empathetic lens of

The concept of "known-unknowns" is thematic to this biography as well as to Poe's macabre works. As human beings, we are aware of our limits, know that we will eventually decline and die, but we don't know how it will go down, we might never. Though Dawidziak arranges Poe's life into a gripping story, he emphasizes objectivity and research. At the very beginning, he disabuses the reader of the notion that any serious biographer knows how Poe died with complete certainty. A supposed quest for his

Lessons shines at disrupting hoary old concepts like good guys and bad guys, clear motivations and closure by tweaking well-trodden themes. Perhaps inevitably, the plot's artful setup, with all its neat foreshadowing and synchronicities guaranteeing a juicy outcome, its trotting out of historical upheavals through yet another fictional character's lens, can feel a tad by-the-numbers. Sometimes you can almost glimpse the novelist consulting his outline and research to make sure no poetic c