The Lost Daughter Collective

"A scholar of Wrist Studies warns his ice-sculpting daughter of the risk involved in girlhood in this satirical novel that aims to collapse the distinction between history and allegory. Using bedtime stories as cautionary tales, a Wrist Scholar relays the story of a fabled group of fathers coping with dead and missing daughters while--or perhaps before, or perhaps after--the self-help group known as the Fathers of Lost Daughters collectively narrate the myth of the Ice Girl and Her Father without Wrists.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. When the girl who sculpts ice sacrifices everything to send a final message to her father through her art and when 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. 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. Whose stories do we trust? Why do we trust them? What happens when we are forced to believe one story over another?"--