cover image The Lost Daughter Collective

The Lost Daughter Collective

Lindsey Drager. Dzanc (PGW, dist.), $15.95 trade paper (176p) ISBN 978-1-941088-73-9

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. (Mar.)