From Carolyn Ferrell, author of the award-winning short story collection DON’T ERASE ME, comes DEAR MISS METROPOLITAN, an inventive and shocking novel that unpacks the before, during and after of an unthinkable tragedy --- and the tensions of grief, rage and power that surround it.

On the night that two girls and a toddler are rescued from a dilapidated house in Queens, elderly Mathilda Marron --- Miss Metropolitan --- is bemoaning the stagnation of her career. A longtime advice columnist for the Queens Metropolitan, Marron is better suited to notetaking and typewriters than social media and emails, and her journalism tends to skew toward the literary rather than the fact-based. But all of that aside, Marron knows she is a newspaperwoman through and through, so how could she have not been aware of the horrors taking place right across the street? And how could she and her neighbors have missed two young girls taken captive so long ago that they have now emerged as women? Doubtless there were signs of their captivity --- screams, smells, an overwhelming sense of doom, something --- yet no one seems to know why they were chosen. No one, that is, except for the girls themselves.

"Ferrell is a writer completely unafraid of risks, and her fearlessness is propulsive, even when you are not entirely sure what is going on.... Her talent is too stunning to ignore."

There were once three of them: Fern, the “Soul Train”-watching daughter of a pill-popping nurse; Gwin, a devoted Prince fan held under the thumb of her church-obsessed mother; and Jesenia, a beautiful fairy-tale of a girl who is wise beyond her years. In short but telling chapters, Ferrell drops us into the life of each girl before her abduction. We see not only the unfair and often unreachable standards put upon young girls but also the dysfunction and terror already surrounding them: the drug-abusing mother; her “just like family” boyfriend whose touches don’t feel familial; the church congregation that judges as often as it redeems; and the abusive boyfriend whose punches feel like love. Though the chapters are short and often interspersed with sections about the girls’ lives in captivity, Ferrell does a remarkable job writing each one with a distinct and dynamic voice.

And then there is the girls’ captor, Boss Man. He kidnapped them and turned them into “Employees,” who were forced to clean, count, and be tortured and raped in order to make himself feel powerful. Ferrell never once shies away from the realities of Boss Man’s abuses --- the rapes that turn into pregnancies that turn into violent abortions, the torture sessions that leave the girls feeling dreamlike and brain-free --- and it is not easy to watch them be treated in such graphic, unthinkable ways.

When Fern and Gwin are finally rescued, after Jesenia has disappeared, their torture is far from over. For months they are swarmed by well-meaning visitors from social services, church groups, victim advocacy organizations and even television hosts, all of whom feel the need to tell them again and again that “what happened was not their fault.” But who ever said it was? Bound to one another by endurance and survival, Fern and Gwin shrug off these irritating visits, learn to love again through their kind nurses, and dream of Jesenia, who helped get them through their captivity by telling them stories, dreaming up delicious, rich dinners made only of water and newspaper, and pulling Boss Man’s attention and punishments onto herself instead of her “sisters.” Through it all, her whereabouts hangs over their heads, along with the mystery of the toddler who was rescued with them.

At about the halfway mark, the novel jumps into the future, with new characters entering the fold, taking up the narration and shifting readers’ focus to new avenues. Already inventive, DEAR MISS METROPOLITAN becomes outright experimental at this point, with both redeeming and head-scratching results. Ferrell’s mashup of stream-of-consciousness prose, layered dialogue, and haunting, poignant passages of isolation and victimhood works undeniably well at times, but screams “less is more!” when it does not.

At its heart, the novel does some heavy work unpacking the realities of the neglect and abuse that women suffer in everyday life --- and the ways that society, their mothers, and their schools and churches encourage them to do so silently. The fairy tales Jesenia tells the girls seem to echo this notion, reminding readers of how quickly we aim to convince girls that there is a prince under the fur of every beast, a prince ready to wake us from our nightmares, a bowl of porridge that is “just right” if only we try all the bad ones first. As Ferrell shows us, these fairy tales often play right into the hands of monsters like Boss Man. Even more powerfully, she forces her readers to question why and when it falls to us to step in and put an end to these abuses. How much, in the end, do we owe our daughters, our sisters or our neighbors? Can we ever really stop something as inevitable as abuse of gender, race or socioeconomic hierarchies?

There are other road bumps to understanding here that I feel most readers will be able to overlook: no quotation marks for dialogue, very few identifiers of who is speaking, sudden shifts in voice and time period, and even photos taken by the author that contribute to the tone, if not the facts, of the story. Each element is confusing at first, but easy to understand after about 50 pages or so. That said, DEAR MISS METROPOLITAN takes work; you’ll have to suspend your disbelief not only of what is possible in the world, but of what is possible in fiction.

Ferrell is a writer completely unafraid of risks, and her fearlessness is propulsive, even when you are not entirely sure what is going on. For those willing to put in the time, this is a worthwhile read; for those who need more structure, it is equally worth skipping. Whichever way you lean, you have not heard the last from Carolyn Ferrell. Her talent is too stunning to ignore.