Dear Miss Metropolitan

First published 2021

PEN/Faulkner 2022 · Finalist

“Dear Miss Metropolitan tells the fragmented story of Fern, Gwinnie, and Jesenia, three girls abducted by a monster who calls himself Boss Man and held captive in a decaying house in Queens for a decade. Inspired by real events, the tale is inventively revealed by multiple narrators before, during and after their ordeal. Documents, newspapers, excerpts from books, photographs, interviews, and other forms of media piece together the larger story. By the time they are rescued only two of them remain and in their aftermath the “victim females” are subjected to the further trauma of becoming symbols as the survivors, now patients in a facility, continue to adapt to their present and their unrelenting past.

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The mystery of the disappearance and the illumination of myths about race, gender and the definitions of community and family are at the center of this inventive and urgent fable of survival”—Fern seeks refuge from her mother’s pill-popping and boyfriends via Soul Train. Gwin finds salvation in the music of Prince much to her congregation’s dismay. Jesenia, miles ahead of her classmates at her gifted and talented high school, is a brainy and precocious enigma.