The unnamed and unmoored protagonist of Shannon’s debut novel has reluctantly moved back in with her parents: “I swapped the city I found for the city I came from.” Overeducated and underemployed, she deals with her lack of direction by becoming obsessed with cleaning. When she gets a job as a cleaner at a local art gallery and meets fellow artist Isabella, her life begins to change. The two women immediately hook up despite the fact that Isabella lives with her successful, rich, and bland boyfriend, Paul. As the narrator becomes more enmeshed in their lives, she thinks she may be able to have it all (“I wanted both of them at the same time. I wanted both of them in bed”). When Isabella leaves one day without a word, the narrator begins to slip into a life that doesn’t belong to her. Written in stream-of-consciousness style, the novel is told in one long gulp with no chapters, paragraph breaks, or quotation marks. The form situates you directly in the protagonist’s mind, which can feel claustrophobic because she’s an absolute disaster. Her thoughts ping-pong among sex, art, death, money, children, thrifting, cleaning, cooking, and everything in between. She is flaky, a liar, and makes decisions that seem detached from reality. Unfortunately, the novel is both too absurd and not absurd enough. The plot, when it surfaces between the narrator’s thoughts, is so outlandish at times that it’s distracting. Despite this, Shannon has imbued the novel with a sardonic humor that serves as a bright spot. When the artist sits down with her family to fill out the census, she tells them she’s not heterosexual to little reaction—and thinks, “I questioned whether pure, uncut indifference was in fact homophobic or progressive.” These moments of levity help the book become less mired in the narrator’s seemingly endless nonsensical loop.

Li’s astute sophomore novel opens with lifelong pals Diana Zhang, Justin Yu, Errol Chen, and Vivian Wang graduating into the Great Recession and moving back into their childhood homes in North Potomac, Maryland. Navigating a historically bad job market and their Chinese immigrant parents’ unrealistically high expectations, the friends must also contend with their own sense of failure: “The four of them formed a line of defense against the cautionary tales other people hoped to make of them.” Their friendships are tested when Grace Li—their sometimes-friend, and their parents’ idea of a model child—returns to town. Grace, who, dropped out of Harvard Law School to the others’ delight, is trying to become a documentary filmmaker, and asks the group if she can make a film about them. As the novel is set in the early days of internet fame, the friends agree without fully understanding what this will mean for them—until Grace’s documentary, Bad Asians, goes viral. The video, which propels Grace into YouTube stardom, reveals long-held secrets, unspoken animosity, and growing cracks among the four friends. Declaring a “delicate truce” to “hold them together through this larger crisis,” the friends try to rehab their image in the most ill-fated way possible. Years later, when it all comes back to haunt them, they must each figure out how to survive the consequences of their actions. The novel follows the friends in the eight years after graduation as they grapple with the ways the video—and their foolish attempt to course correct—has changed the trajectory of their lives. Li is a master at drawing characters that feel distinct, layered, and outrageously human, even if the pacing sometimes suffers. Imbued with humor and sharp social commentary, the novel beautifully explores Asian American identity; economic instability; relationships as both anchor and buoy; the malleability of success; and the ways that ambition manifests itself for better or worse.

Stine kicks off what he dubs in his introduction an “Everything Scary Story” (inspired by eating an everything bagel) for middle graders and their parents, “who read my books when they were kids!” He throws in a cheery evil laugh—“Mmmmwahahaha…!”—before launching into a four-part story that packs a creepy old house just off Cthulhu Street that serves as the main setting with all the stuff of nightmares from his considerable arsenal. In short chapters alternating between two equally surreal storylines that may each be a dream of the other, he chucks in an impressive array of disquieting tropes and elements—ranging from spooky creaks and howls to purple worms emerging from noses, a mom who sells crocheted body parts online, teachers in “weird animal masks,” and classics like evil toys and an ominous message scrawled in blood. Even though the point-of-view characters are in a constant state of round-eyed terror, this outing is plainly meant to be in fun, and aside from being splashed with hot green vomit or spending a little time as ventriloquist’s dummies, none of the young people here suffer actual harm from the cascade of supernatural threats, for reasons the author explains at the end. The cast presents white.

Curie’s pioneering research into radioactivity is the hallmark of her astounding career and, in this vivid work of historical fiction, Jersild, a writer and psychologist, imagines what her inner thoughts and desires might have been. She does this so well that Curie feels alive. Excavating Curie’s life, Jersild lets readers experience the sexism and misogyny that permeated the scientific world in the early 20th century. Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize and the first person to win two Nobels, yet she was berated as selfish and unfeminine and “merely” the widow of another scientist. Jersild recreates the way this might have made Curie feel and how it never stopped her from doing the research to which she dedicated her life. Curie’s scientific work was complex and not easy for a layperson to understand, and Jersild wisely keeps the terminology and details of experiments to a minimum without undermining their complexity and nuance. She focuses strongly on the things that shaped Curie: her childhood in Poland; the early loss of her mother; her shortened marriage to Pierre Curie, who died in a freak accident; and, more provocatively, a love affair after her husband’s death with a married scientist that nearly toppled her (but not his) career. With a gimlet eye, Jersild uses this affair to spotlight the double standards to which male and female scientists were held and the way Curie, understandably devastated by her treatment by journalists and the public, managed to pull herself back into her research and new discoveries through the force of her will.

Rachel Del Rio describes herself as “42, childless and single,” and while her comedy career is thriving and her lesbian best friend, Scout McDonough, is supportive, she’s insecure about her personal life. She’s reluctant to attend her 20th college reunion—everyone “who isn’t gay or a crackpot is married with kids.” Rachel finds an unsigned love letter and decides it must be from Jason Smith, her sophomore-year boyfriend; when she’s magically transported back in time 22 years, she decides it’s an opportunity to win him back. She can also do better by her friends, own up to her self-centered behavior, and possibly even save someone’s life. Rachel is missing the full picture, however, and she’ll have to figure everything out before she’s transported back to her adult life. The book doesn’t unpack some internalized misogyny or unhealthy coping behaviors, like excessive drinking. This queer-friendly story also includes frequent positive Harry Potter references in the past timeline, and readers may be surprised that Rachel, who’s distinguished by her sharp tongue and no-holds-barred language, doesn’t mention this irony, particularly given her commentary on other societal cultural shifts. The full-color art has a nostalgic feeling reminiscent of comics from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Rachel has tan skin and black hair, Scout presents white, and Jason has brown skin.