DEAR MISS METROPOLITAN

The author of the story collection Don’t Erase Me (1997) explores the lives of girls who have been kidnapped and tortured in her debut novel.

Fern’s mother works nights at the hospital, where she steals pills. Gwin loves the musician Prince, which is a source of conflict between her and her deeply religious mother. Fern barely remembers her father. Gwin never knew hers, but she did have Mr. P. until he decided to leave her mother. Fern and Gwin find each other when they are both being held captive by a man who keeps them in chains, beats them, and rapes them for years. Later, a third girl will join them. Before she was abducted, Jesenia had an abusive boyfriend; after she was abducted, she had her captor’s baby. The first part of this novel shifts between the girls’ early lives and their experiences as prisoners in Queens, New York. There are also glimpses of what happens when they are free again. Ferrell’s blend of stream-of-consciousness with dark fairy-tale elements is inventive but only fitfully effective, and sections narrated by other voices—including the journalist whose advice column, for reasons that are not at all clear, gives this book its title—are more confusing than illuminating. The second half of this novel is less repetitive than the first, but it also makes less sense. There is, for example, a very long chapter that seems to be Jesenia’s daughter’s answers to questions she’s being asked before she can be released from the hospital after a suicide attempt. There are footnotes. It’s not difficult to envision this chapter as a powerful short story, but it’s a challenge to read after having endured the first half. Ferrell is asking a lot of her audience. What she gives is sometimes too much, sometimes too little.

A punishing read in terms of both content and style.