Pretty Little Dirty, the debut novel by Amanda Boyden, is a coming-of-age story that feels both immediately familiar and devastatingly foreign, a combination that produces an absorbing emotional torrent of a novel, whose fast-paced plot crescendos into horror. The story takes place in Kansas City, Missouri—a place not so different from Buffalo. The city consists of a few busy shopping strips, one vast and cool art gallery, a few local universities and a multitude of suburban neighborhoods, whose hometown homogeneity belies the inequable economic distribution of wealth between them.

If you are looking for a frothy tell-all about the early life and exploits of one of rock’s most notoriously rowdy and drug-addled front women, Courtney Love, it would be in your best interest to rent Kurt and Courtney rather than read Linda Carroll’s new, verbosely titled memoir, Her Mother’s Daughter: A Memoir of the Mother I Never Knew and of My Daughter, Courtney Love. Though at first the memoir seems intent on replicating the exposé style of Deborah Spungen’s biography of her drug-crazed punk rock daughter Nancy, who also happens to be Love’s idol, Carroll’s story quickly becomes a sensitive inquiry into the nature of the myriad roles women take on in relation both to each other and to men and the ways in which these roles enrich and shape the course of a woman’s life. Love’s presence in the memoir is undeniable—the book contains memorable descriptions of Love’s conception while Carroll was on an acid trip and of Love’s violent bipolar outbursts as a child—but she is merely the ribbon tying together this rich and woman-friendly account of a young woman’s search for identity during the confusing and turbulent 1960s. Ultimately, the intense vulnerability Carroll displays in rehashing the events of the childhood she spent with her adoptive parents and the adulthood she spent searching for herself and her mother leave a strong impression on the reader. While Love may be the reason a woman picks up the book, Carroll’s colorful portrait of the female condition in this country is what will keep her reading.

H. L. Mencken was, without question, the finest newspaper columnist, book reviewer and political commentator this country has ever produced. He also made important contributions to academic linguistics with his multi-volume American Language. Even when he was wrong, as he often was—about Jews, Nazis, Orientals, Blacks, Britons, women and WASPs, for example—he was worth reading. Some loved him; some hated him; all read him. Until, that is, he died a half century ago on January 26, 1956. How then can a biographer miss? I depart from other reviewers, one of whom considers Mencken, The American Iconoclast “the best Mencken biography to date,” in believing that unfortunately Ms. Rodgers has found a way. Her book succeeds as a detailed diary of the author’s life; it fails to add meat to those bones. If you want to learn of Mencken’s affairs, some with Hollywood and Broadway actresses; if you want to read how he acted up at the Scopes trial and at national political conventions; or if you want to read about his editing positions and how he worked, read here. But if you want to gain an understanding of this amazing man, look elsewhere. Look in particular at his writing. Open to any page of The American Language or its supplements, to any collection of his columns, his essays or his correspondence and you will meet a prose stylist of the highest order. This is, after all, the writer who tells us, “Nature abhors a moron,” and “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”