Over a five-year period, Martha Johnson murders her four children, one by one, in order to punish her husband when they argue, but Martha is no ordinary serial killer. She murders her children by using the bulk of her 250-pound body to suffocate them. Unlike other fictionalized true-crime novels, Underneath neither valorizes nor focuses on the specific acts of violence. Instead, it attempts to understand how feelings of powerlessness, the residue of trauma, and the need to find justice in a world that refuses to give a fat body justice finds its only respite through murder.

Invisible Women is really two books entwined in one, a dialogue between psychoanalysts weaving through descriptions of luminous women. Told in a specific collective “we,” Hoang’s own voice becomes a compelling part of what’s being told. Just like Italo Calvino wrote of vast buildings constructed of words alone in Invisible Cities, Invisible Womenpresents complicated stories of feminine archetypes in the form of psychoanalytic case studies.