When I adore a novel and consume it as quickly as I did Malena Watrous’s debut, If You Follow Me, it can be difficult to dissect and analyze. The novel is so engrossing, so tightly knit, that I’m reluctant to pull back the curtain and pick apart its mechanics. To attack it with a scalpel seems like a disservice, but Watrous’s novel is complex and meaty enough to warrant close inspection.

Marina is a blond California girl just out of college, who finds herself tagging along with her first girlfriend to teach English in Japan. She’s rushing to the other side of the world, falling headlong into a serious relationship, to escape her father’s recent suicide. In the remote seaside town of Shika, Marina feels stunned, gawky, and outsized in appearance and behavior. Watrous hits the voice of Marina with perfect pitch—cocky, daring, grasping, sometimes flighty, simultaneously overconfident and nakedly insecure. At first this frenetic voice felt exasperating—until I realized Watrous was simply reproducing Marina’s confused emotional state with great accuracy.

At twenty-two, she thinks she knows the world, but the world is often obliged to show her she’s mistaken. A bit sheltered, but with the bravado and idealism of youth, Marina exhibits a smidge of American entitlement but is ultimately open-minded and a good sport. While she’s frustrated by, and sometimes dismissive of, the reserved nature of Japanese culture, Marina is also willing to participate in naked bathing rituals with her neighbors and tutor a colleague’s severely autistic son.

Malena Watrous

Language is pushed to the forefront of the novel, a decision that fits well with its themes. What the characters struggle to say, what goes unsaid, what cannot be expressed—all are thrown into sharp relief against the backdrop of language barriers and cultural difference, and Marina’s slog through her emotional fallout. Her supervisor, Hiroshi Miyoshi, writes her long letters regarding the many affronts to Japanese culture she has committed; these letters are endearingly honest compared to his verbal interactions with Marina and reveal much about their writer:

I thought about how English is useful when I sing karaoke. I should begin by saying that singing is not truly my “hobby.” “Hobby” means for fun I think. But karaoke is how I speak my truth. If I use my speaking voice to say “I am lonesome,” especially if I say in Japanese, they will find me kind of pathetic and probably run away. In any case, I would never say this. But if I sing “I feel so all alone” in style of Elvis Presley, maybe they will not run away. Maybe they will come closer, to enjoy great song, and lonesome feeling will go away.

Problem is, life is not karaoke booth.

Other citizens of Shika use conversational English to let off steam and express sentiments that would otherwise be frowned upon. In her role as English teacher, Marina struggles, with amusingly mixed results, to make her native language meaningful to the future secretaries and factory workers in her classes, encouraging them to explore beyond the catch phrases of American television and fashion magazines.

Navigating the elaborate gomi laws that govern garbage disposal presents Marina with the starkest cultural differences between her and her Japanese counterparts. Here, Watrous’s writing is at its best, conveying dark-ish humor, paralyzing awkwardness, and the depths of heartache. We chuckle at Marina’s mortification upon learning that a nosy neighbor was obliged to fish her non-recyclable tampons out of the recycling bag; we’re equally crushed when her roommate’s beloved cat is found suffocated inside an improperly disposed refrigerator. It’s appropriate, then, that Marina’s grief, which she plays very close to the vest, culminates in a desperate search for her father’s mementos in a mountain of trash.

This grief is the dark current that bubbles to the surface in the most unexpected places. Marina’s struggle with her father’s death is long, complicated, and confusing. The traditional Japanese respect for personal privacy, while difficult for many Westerners to adapt to, turns out to be therapeutic for a lonely daughter sorting through the sudden loss of a parent. Though no one asks awkward questions, it turns out they understand more than one might expect.

If You Follow Me is a good antidote to books like Eat, Pray, Love. Sure, it’s also about an American girl who finds self-knowledge and solace abroad—but Watrous’s novel is no self-indulgent romp. She writes real, flawed human beings in genuine relationships stumbling toward the adorably quirky on one side or the broodingly obscure on the other. If You Follow Me is a delicious joy to devour, but still gives plenty of cud to chew on after you’ve finished.

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Feel free to take the title of Drenched literally, since the universe of Marisa Matarazzo’s first book is soaked through, awash in torrential love and water. In this series of intertwined stories, characters of several generations desperately love, mutilate, and abandon each other, suspended in no specific time or place but always surrounded by (and sometimes filled with) water. Characters often take to the sea, while other times the sea comes to them, as with two sexually adventurous, shipbuilding teens swept away by a flood in the squishy and shimmering “Hangdangling.”

Matarazzo seems to be writing under the influence of Aimee Bender, who generously blurbs this debut collection. Not a copycat, but certainly an acolyte, Matarazzo’s characters inhabit a universe that’s a bit distorted, a bit refracted. While the terrain is sometimes unfamiliar, the emotions are crystal clear and often tactile. An unnamed first-person narrator in “Henchmen,” on a vengeful mission to murder the fictional CEO of Target who has adulterated the product she invented, bears physical scars on her chest after being separated from her sweetheart. Even as members of the CEO’s security team pursue and seduce her, she searches their bodies to see if they share her scars—and, by implication, her pain.

The scarred assassin, a full-grown adult whom we follow through the book, is actually an outlier; most of the characters in Drenched are just lonely kids, forced to wrestle too early with the twin confusions of sex and death. But their vibrant, adult vocabularies can add insight and pathos. Much of the time, the significant action happens inside their heads—aside from the magical red Jell-O and underwater Russian escape pod, that is. Sailor, one of the seafaring teens from “Hangdangling,” manifests typical adolescent sensibility alongside unusual wisdom:

And when he asks what’d you do today? She can say nothing, same-old-same. When in truth, ripe all over her skin and dancing wildly through her thoughts and underwear, is the fact that she’s just had delicious jellyfish sex with the person who is the breath-filching favorite of her life.

Marisa Matazarro

Lines like those titillate the reader, as though we’re reading the super-secret diary of an incredibly perceptive high school student. No gossip girls here—this is much juicier.

Even when they’re soaked in the mundane details of suburban life, there’s nothing tidy about the stories in Drenched. Love is messy as the blood from an amputation, or a murder, and even more so the complicated emotions that attend all this passion and loss. Some of those emotions are just plain confounding, like the practice of Ashlyn Aschenberger in “Fisty Pinions,” which involves taping heavy glass ashtrays to her breasts and brazenly chain-smoking into them, a physical manifestation of grief upon the death of her parents. Others are sympathetic, like the scabbed mouth of a handicapped girl who just wants to kiss her boyfriend’s mouth, nothing more. Too bad his scalding teeth burn her lips on contact.

Such is the fate of two young people in “Hotmouths” who try to be together despite emotional baggage, a significant age difference, and disapproving elders. If the plot sounds well-worn, think again: The girl has no hands and the man has teeth made of rose quartz that sizzle as his blood rises, to both darkly comic and sweetly sentimental effect. Matarazzo has an endearing, palpable affection for these imperfect bodies, one she skillfully transfers to the reader by osmosis, capturing the obsessive and myopic nature of young love.

Families, on the other hand, are fractured and sometimes downright cruel, like all the parents in “Freshet” who, desperate after losing their reliable babysitters, affectionately surrender their young children to the ocean. Although this reader was left wondering why the parents didn’t simply organize a babysitting co-op, the parting scene is still heart-wrenching, with children toddling toward the waves while grieving parents flop on the beach like gasping fish:

Shrill children screams and yips are swallowed by ocean rumble as they are sucked into the salty sea and the beach is washed bare. In the darkening light, baby shadows shift in silhouette inside the faces of tall waves, then disappear. The children are coddled out, pocketed by the deep. One, two, three at a time. Until the sky is black, the sand is black, the sea is black.

Some threads run through the stories of Drenched like a current, while others eddy and fizzle out after a few pages. The abandoned babies make another cameo appearance near the end of the book, viewed through a peephole by a character in another story. Fortunately, Matarazzo’s primary current is powerful enough to carry us through to the end; though some of the material could have been whittled away, the chaotic nature of these love affairs fits the rolling, tidal rhythm of the book as a whole. Imagine a tropical vacation that accidentally lands you in the middle of monsoon season, and you’ve got Matarazzo’s fascinating debut.

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Mel is a traveling textile designer and salesperson, while Toby is a magician whose magic is more than an illusion: it’s a gift and a burden, and it becomes an obsession. While it’s true that the two meet cutely at a remote bar in the middle of the desert, the romance that ensues is anything but formulaic. That’s what makes Ivy Pochoda’s first novel, The Art of Disappearing, so captivating. It’s about love and magic, but it’s far from a Hollywood romance.

Exploring why Mel and Toby are so intensely drawn to each other is one of the book’s strongest threads—could Toby could have conjured Mel to his side? Are they predestined for each other? Is it just a coincidence? Whatever is at play, within 24 hours the two end up marrying in a Las Vegas wedding chapel and honeymooning at the Laughing Jackalope Motel.

Toby has dreams of making it big as a Vegas showman, but it soon becomes clear that his magic has consequences, both for him professionally and for his relationship with Mel. In some ways, his unusual magic makes him more vulnerable than most magicians, who rely on sleight-of-hand and illusion to captivate the audience. On the other hand, Toby’s gift allows him to shift reality in breathtaking ways. His talent is just as much a curse, since he doesn’t entirely understand it. After a trick has a disastrous outcome, and with a spurned couple from Toby’s past snooping around trying to sabotage his big break, the lovebirds leap from Vegas to Amsterdam, where a cadre of aging magicians urges Toby into their fold. In trying to make sense of things, manipulation becomes an obsession for Toby.

Ivy Pochoda

Throughout The Art of Disappearing, Pochoda toys with ideas of predestination and power dynamics in relationships. The union of Toby and Mel is a coupling of two profoundly talented individuals—since Mel is an inspired designer in her own right—but Toby’s craft is showier, and it’s rooted in public admiration. Mel has been damaged by a complicated relationship with her brother Max, who disappeared from her life twice when she was growing up; vivid flashbacks show that this is not the first time Mel has struggled to keep pace with a loved one who has his sights set on something not of this world.

As the story unfolds, the reader wonders if this talented woman is going down the well-trod path of so many wives subsumed by their husbands’ fame. As for Toby, the star of the show, will he always choose glory over love? Pochoda’s prose is colorful, light-filled, panoramic:

“Amsterdam seemed to me to be tinted with the last paint coaxed from the corners of a once-vivid watercolor palette. The sky that peeked between the gabled buildings was not the blue promised by the famous Delft tiles, but a blue that has been stretched thin, made gray with too much water.”

These descriptive, liquid scenes carry the reader along smoothly for a while, making the occasional abrupt scene change even more jarring. After one small, intimate conversation between Toby and Mel that seems to take place on a lonely road in the desert, they step out of the beat-up minivan, leave the keys, and we realize they’re at the airport, on their way to Amsterdam. Such set changes seem to happen at the wave of a wand, like magic, in keeping with the rhythm of the novel.

Though The Art of Disappearing has been compared to The Time Traveler’s Wife, Pochoda’s novel is, in some ways, more elaborate than Niffenegger’s—the prose is lusher, the characters more melancholy, the style more mysterious. Though the story takes place in the modern day, the action seems to take place outside of time—in an abandoned tract house from the 1960s, on a mesa in the Mojave desert, at a masquerade rave in the Amsterdam catacombs.

Toby’s magic is often mystifying, but in the same way that Mel’s conversations with fabric, and her brother Max’s symbiotic relationship to water, seem organic to the characters. The mechanics are not written to be analyzed and dissected—instead, readers are asked to suspend their disbelief and enjoy this tumultuous ride through marriage and ambition, loneliness and devotion, magic and reality.

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