Whether it’s via their tone, topic, or tenor, certain works just say “America.” Here are three such titles, suggested by David Bruce Smith, founder of the Grateful American™ Foundation, in partnership with the Washington Independent Review of Books.

• I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg. A 16-year-old girl enters a mental hospital to conquer her schizophrenia in a 1964 novel called “convincing and emotionally gripping” by the New York Times.
• The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. Gilded-Age Manhattan serves as both a rarefied playground and an emotional prison for its moneyed, hollow inhabitants, chief among them Lily Bart.
• Like a River: A Civil War Novel by Kathy Cannon Wiechman. Two teens — one an underage boy, the other a girl in disguise — fight for the Union and their own futures in this visceral tale written for middle-grade readers.