Dear Miss Metropolitan

DEBUT Ferrell, author of the multi-award-winning story collection Don’t Erase Me, offers a powerful debut novel about three girls who are abducted and kept by Boss Man for 10 years in a house on Amity Lane in Queens, NY, where they are tortured, raped, and starved. When Fern Daisy Delores, Gwindolyn Parsons, and Jesenia Diaz escape this Queens House of Horrors, the neighbors wonder why they didn’t know what was going on in their own community. TV talk show hosts and journalists (particularly the eponymous advice columnist at the local weekly, who lives right across the street) are among the multitude of people who badger the girls to talk about their long ordeal, hindering their recovery. 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.