Dear Miss Metropolitan
A Novel
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2.3 • 6 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A finalist for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
A finalist for the 2022 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel
Introducing an extraordinary and original writer whose first novel explores the intersections of grief and rage, personal strength and healing--and what we owe one another.
Fern seeks refuge from her mother’s pill-popping and boyfriends via Soul Train; Gwin finds salvation in the music of Prince much to her congregation’s dismay and Jesenia, miles ahead of her classmates at her gifted and talented high school, is a brainy and precocious enigma. None of this matters to Boss Man, the monster who abducts them and holds them captive in a dilapidated house in Queens.
On the night they are finally rescued, throngs line the block gawking and claiming ignorance. Among them is lifetime resident Miss Metropolitan, advice columnist for the local weekly, but how could anyone who fancies herself a “newspaperwoman” have missed a horror story unfolding right across the street? And why is it that only two of the three girls—now women—were found? The mystery haunts the two remaining “victim girls” who are subjected to the further trauma of becoming symbols as they continuously adapt to their present and their unrelenting past.
Like Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, Ferrell’s Dear Miss Metropolitan gives voice to characters surviving unimaginable tragedy. The story is inventively revealed before, during, and after the ordeal in this singular and urgent novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ferrell's innovative and harrowing debut novel (after the collection Don't Erase Me) draws on the Ariel Castro kidnappings in Cleveland for a story about the abduction and captivity of three young women in Queens, N.Y., and their subsequent escape in 2007. Prior to their abductions in the late 1990s, each of the "victim-girls" finds coping mechanisms to survive their difficult situations. Fern, 13, distracts herself from her mother's drug abuse and lecherous boyfriends with Soul Train VHS tapes; Gwin, 15, skirts her mother's increasingly radical Jehovah's Witnesses ideas by grooving to Prince; and the quick-witted Jesenia, nearly 17, leaves Queens with her doting but violent boyfriend. The three are chained in a decrepit house and tortured by their sadistic captor, known only as "Boss Man," for close to 10 years. When they are finally discovered and freed, the surrounding community members, including Mathilda Marron, a newspaper advice columnist known as "Miss Metropolitan" who has lived next door to the house the girls were held in for four decades, grapple with guilt over not discovering them sooner. Composed of an assemblage of fragments, photos, articles by Mathilda, and first-person narration from the victims, this effectively unpacks both individual and collective trauma. It's blistering from page one.
Customer Reviews
Waste of time
This book doesn’t even deserve a rating. I regret the time and money I wasted on this book. This has to be the worse book I have ever read.