If you’re a Francophile with an interest in psychoanalysis, Lauren Elkin’s smart and steamy debut novel, “Scaffolding,” may be for you.

Even if you’re just a reader looking for an intriguing story of desire and love among a bright corps of professionals in France, Elkin’s book can be a beguiling puzzle — and a deep intellectual dive.

Set in contemporary Paris, the historic sites and charms of the city provide a backdrop for the narrative, mostly told by Anna, a 39-year-old psychoanalyst. She has had a miscarriage and fallen into depression. Taking leave from work, she finds her own psychiatrist of little help. Her husband, David, a lawyer, is away in London, busy with a long Brexit case.

Enter Clementine. She’s bright, animated, with a zeal for feminist causes. She has moved into a nearby apartment with her boyfriend, Jonathan, also a lawyer with a heavy workload.

As their lives become entwined, Anna is besieged by relentless noises of refacing work at her apartment building. Soon scaffolding is raised outside her windows and an invasive cracking and scraping of the blackened outer building crust begins. Meanwhile, inside their apartment, Anna and David begin renovating the dismal kitchen. The incessant grinding sounds of reconstruction reflect the transitioning of the apartment space, but they also serve figuratively as the arc of Anna’s life moves.

The novel is often written in spurts of short pages, thoughts and recollections akin to jottings in a journal. Elsewhere the story turns on a century or more of psychoanalytic concepts, mostly from Sigmund Freud to Jacques Lacan.

The story is told in three sections. The first and last are set in Anna’s modern Paris, where Clementine and feminist allies furtively post protest signs at night. The middle section of the book is set decades earlier, in mid-20th century France, when Lacan was alive and viewed as a maestro by his acolytes.

The changing of time periods and narrators makes the story resemble a where-does-this-fit puzzle. But piecing it together in the end is part of what makes “Scaffolding” a pleasure overall — maybe even therapeutic. — Kendal Weaver, Associated Press

“The Other Black Girl,” “Lovecraft Country” and Jordan Peele are trotted out on the back cover of “We Came to Welcome You:” as inducements to read Vincent Tirado’s new book, subtitled “A Novel of Suburban Horror.” As enticing as those comparisons are, I would temper your expectations.

The concept is compelling enough. An interracial gay couple — Sol is Dominican, and Alice is Korean — buy a house in a gated community, and their presence is immediately at odds with Maneless Grove’s perfectly perfect pleasantness and uniformity. Sol notices that the house she and her wife bought is different from the rest, but this doesn’t necessarily give her pause, despite her enormous trust issues and anxieties, as well as a penchant to drink way too much Everclear.

Once Sol realizes someone is watching her, the door literally and figuratively opens to a series of microaggressions and a string of weird occurrences that all culminate in ... well, that’s the problem.

Tirado’s world-building leaves much to be desired. Tirado spends an inordinate amount of time telling instead of showing, and constantly backfills, drowning any curiosity.

When curiosity is allowed to grow, often nothing comes of it. The rest is wearyingly repetitive. Something odd happens. Sol questions what she’s seeing, but she refuses to tell her wife, who doesn’t seem to notice anything. Sol investigates. She finds out enough to make her wonder if she’s onto something, and then she’s thwarted and back to questioning her reality.

By the end, I, too, felt much like Sol when “liquid emotion was threatening to pour out of her eyes.” I kid you not. — Maren Longbella, Minnesota Star Tribune