Dear Miss Metropolitan // (Paperback)

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 mothers pill-popping and boyfriends via Soul Train; Gwin finds salvation in the music of Prince much to her congregations 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 girlsnow womenwere 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’sThe Nickel Boys, FerrellsDear Miss Metropolitangives voice to characters surviving unimaginable tragedy. The story is inventively revealed before, during, and after the ordeal in this singular and urgent novel.

Carolyn Ferrellis the author of the short-story collectionDont Erase Me, which was awarded the Art Seidenbaum Award of theLos Angeles TimesBook Prize program, the John C. Zacharis Award given byPloughshares, 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. Ferrells stories have been anthologized inBest American Short Stories 2018andThe 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.

• Publisher:Holt Paperbacks (July 12, 2022)
• Language:English
• Paperback:432 pages
• ISBN-10:1250839017
• ISBN-13:9781250839015
• Item Weight:1.04 pounds
• Dimensions:5.85 x 1.35 x 8.95 inches