The only real thing to call out about this cover is that there's an iguana on it. He is important, that iguana.

If I tell you that this book is, in large part, about sex offenders living under an overpass in a notional Florida town that you should basically envision as Miami, I have explained the substructure for the plot but told you very little about what makes this book so haunting. If I then explain to you that what makes it haunting is what it says about living in America today — the gaudy high rises on the Florida coast; addiction to pornography; dysfunctional single-parent families; children with no friends other than those they meet online — I’m not really going to woo you into reading this novel.

So suffice to say that [book: Lost Memory of Skin] is a little gut-churning masterpiece that I was obsessively reading every chance I got over Thanksgiving. You should read it, too. It’s an exceptionally well-told story that somehow also manages to say a lot of really important and depressing things about American life in the early 21st century.