... stunning and innovative ... The ripped-from-the-headlines premise might seem sensational, but Dear Miss Metropolitan is not horror or thriller, but a literary novel, experimental in style, that asks readers to immerse themselves in the psyches of the deeply traumatized. This is an artful text: an intricate mosaic of shifting viewpoints, black-and-white photographs and fragmented, unreliable narration. The novel is not easy, but how could it be? ... Humming with specificity, Dear Miss Metropolitan rejects easy caricatures of suffering ... Ferrell resists clichés, allowing the girls’ inner lives to diverge ... The premise of Dear Miss Metropolitan is reminiscent of Emma Donoghue’s Room, though Ferrell’s novel feels more expansive in scope and richer in its exploration of trauma. Ferrell writes with no illusions that this kind of violence can be contained; neither causation nor blame is neatly assigned ... Through all this darkness, Ferrell writes with a steady, empathetic hand. She leaves space for tenderness ... Yes, Dear Miss Metropolitan is devastating, but it shouldn’t be summed up as such. This is a blistering contribution to the cohort of contemporary literature focused on sexual violence. It is a novel that reads like a labyrinth, as complex as the trauma it depicts.

Our culture does not lack for tales of girls in captivity ... I can guarantee, though, that you’ve never read a book quite like Carolyn Ferrell’s first novel ... Ferrell is a seasoned writer ... Her immense talents are on full display in Dear Miss Metropolitan, a challenging, unwieldy novel built from hundreds of lyrical fragments, woven together with music, poetry, fairy tales and photography ... Ferrell offers an expansive portrait of trauma, examining its persistent, timeless, all-consuming nature ... parts vary greatly in voice and structure, but they collide and pile up into a memorable, if sometimes befuddling, whole ... Not every mansion Ferrell visits yields secret troves of treasure, but she ensures they are all worth exploring.

... a difficult novel to read. The subject matter is about as grim as grim gets ... is difficult to read, too, because of its structure. Ferrell mixes bits of narrative, collage-style, with snippets of news stories, with letters and lists and spells and incantations and social service assessments and the answers to tests and questionnaires. There are atmospheric photographs. The effect is to keep the book’s action slightly remote, at a distance ... No real narrative force is permitted to develop in Ferrell’s novel, either. It’s an endurance test. I admired it while longing for it to end ... Ferrell’s title, Dear Miss Metropolitan, summons to mind the dark comedy of Nathanael West’s 1933 advice-column novel, Miss Lonelyhearts. It’s a misleading title for this book ... The author is a vivid maker of sentences with a flair for casual surrealisms ... There are few scenes of applied, extended torment in Dear Miss Metropolitan. But the dry facts, unbearable in every detail, are more than enough. Over the course of the novel, they make something in your soul break down ... It becomes clear, and not for the first time, that Ferrell is navigating American trauma writ large, as well as her characters’ own. Some nightmares, and subsidiary nightmares, aren’t easily outrun.

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 ... 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.

Entering into this book is like leaping into a pool either a little too hot or a little too cold—it’s bracing at first, but then you adapt and cannot imagine any other pool ... a book that aims at—and becomes—the animating, unflinching epic poem of Queens, NY ... Like most good books, Dear Miss Metropolitan defies easy summary ... a fractured and frenetic structure that describes the characters’ ongoing temporal dislocation. The book is jarring in subject matter and delivery, and I will make no attempt to make it less so. Ferrell’s prose has a patter and a pulse, which is to say it is language that has been truly composed. Sometimes we listen in on distilled minds, voices offering inner monologues or answering questionnaires, and on occasion the writing is like the whole of a culture, approximated in words ... In breadth and skill, insight and innovation, Dear Miss Metropolitan takes its place alongside Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 among the most profound works of literature to have emerged from crimes so horrific they became international sensations. Years in the making, emerging from a mind transformed by decades in a chrysalis, the book leaves one heaving a glorious sigh, feeling that it was well worth the wait, and harboring a secret hope that the next cocoon will crack more quickly.

... a brave examination into the accumulation of unresolved generational trauma and its detrimental outcomes. She weaves in different time periods, offering insight into the lives of the girls before their kidnapping, the collective sisterhood built during their bondage, and their courageous healing into womanhood afterward. Ferrell writes with a masterful honesty that champions her protagonists, and also leaves a clear space for readers to examine their own wounds.

... powerful ... Ferrell deftly portrays the girls’ captivity and their lives after gaining freedom and supplies backstory for each of them, all while keeping the pages turning to create a spellbinding story. Images, poem snippets, and lyrics from songs by Diana Ross, Prince, and Billy Ocean break up the haunting prose and clarify the fragmentary nature of the girls’ world ... This tale of pain and healing will keep readers fully engaged and discussion groups talking for a long time.

Ferrell’s innovative and harrowing debut novel draws on the Ariel Castro kidnappings in Cleveland for a story about the abduction and captivity of three young women in Queens, N.Y., and their subsequent escape in 2007 ... Composed of an assemblage of fragments, photos, articles by Mathilda, and first-person narration from the victims, this effectively unpacks both individual and collective trauma. It’s blistering from page one.

The first part of this novel shifts between the girls’ early lives and their experiences as prisoners in Queens, New York. There are also glimpses of what happens when they are free again. Ferrell’s blend of stream-of-consciousness with dark fairy-tale elements is inventive but only fitfully effective, and sections narrated by other voices—including the journalist whose advice column, for reasons that are not at all clear, gives this book its title—are more confusing than illuminating. The second half of this novel is less repetitive than the first, but it also makes less sense ... It’s not difficult to envision this chapter as a powerful short story, but it’s a challenge to read after having endured the first half. Ferrell is asking a lot of her audience. What she gives is sometimes too much, sometimes too little. A punishing read in terms of both content and style.