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A Novel
by Carolyn Ferrell
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.
"Ferrell astounds with the complex and formally inventive story of three young women who are kidnapped and held captive at a house in Queens, N.Y., and of their discovery a decade later... . It's a powerful examination of collective trauma." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"This tale of pain and healing will keep readers fully engaged and discussion groups talking for a long time." ―Library Journal (starred review)
"I can guarantee, though, that you've never read a book quite like Carolyn Ferrell's first novel ... Not every mansion Ferrell visits yields secret troves of treasure, but she ensures they are all worth exploring." ―USA Today
"[A] vivid maker of sentences with a flair for casual surrealisms ... Ferrell is navigating American trauma writ large, as well as her characters' own." ―New York Times
"I think this is really a brilliant book. No one is better than Carolyn Ferrell at capturing the vitality of human voices, and here they blaze out a portrait of the unthinkable, three young women kidnapped for more than a decade. It's a page-turner genius of a book, astute about the details that sustain, the traps that spring, and what it means to be a girl." ―Joan Silber, author of Improvement
"A brilliant novel, and a stunning feat of sympathetic imagination. It's an amazing accomplishment, to write a book that is so terribly, indelibly sad and also so funny." ―Brian Morton, author of Starting Out in the Evening and Florence Gordon
This information about Dear Miss Metropolitan was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Carolyn Ferrell is the author of the short-story collection Don't Erase Me, which was awarded the Art Seidenbaum Award of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize program, the John C. Zacharis Award given by Ploughshares, and the Quality Paperback Book Prize for First Fiction. She has also received grants from the Fulbright Association, German Academic Exchange (DAAD), City University of New York MAGNET Program, and National Endowment for the Arts. Ferrell's stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2018 and The Best American Short Stories of the Century, among other places. She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York with her husband and children.
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