The Lost Daughter Collective
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Using bedtime stories as cautionary tales, a Wrist Scholar relays the story of a fabled group of fathers coping with dead and missing daughters. When the girl sacrifices everything to send a final message to her father through her art and one lost girl is revealed to be not dead or missing but a daughter who has transitioned into a son, fathers are faced with the reality that their children’s “play” is anything but.
Caught in a strange loop that—like Escher’s “Drawing Hands”—confuses the line between reality and artifice, folklore and scholarship, far past and near future, The Lost Daughter Collective illustrates how the stories we receive are shaped by those who do the telling.
A story about the complex relationship between fathers and daughters as well as the ethics of storytelling, The Lost Daughter Collective is a gothic fairy tale fusing the fabulism at work in Donald Barthleme and Ben Marcus with the brevity and language play of Rikki Ducornet and Jenny Offill to raise questions about agency and authorship in our narratives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Drager (The Sorrow Paper) mixes fairy tale and gender politics into her novel of interlinked fictions about father, daughters, and how we tell stories. In these sections fathers tell stories to daughters, fathers lose daughters, and fathers realize sometimes that maybe they never had daughters at all. While the language of folktale is often invoked, including allusions to Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, Drager also trades in stranger logic as well: scholars of "wrist studies," "cold art methodology," "museums of paternal understanding," and more. The stories connect to form a greater whole, yet many feel isolated as well; characters reappear and shift throughout; and sometimes very short sections also include diagrams, textual trickery, and epigraphs. The themes include father-daughter relationships, but also the nature of storytelling as a gendered art and the way that texts can be misread through both scholarship and their own tellings. Ultimately, Drager's book is clever and formally rich, but a palpable coldness remains the layers seem to distance the characters more than illuminate them.
