Every woman was once a girl
and every girl was once a daughter
For every woman in the world,
there will always be laughter in slaughter.
Midnight at the Institute. Using bedtime stories as cautionary tales, a Wrist Scholar tells his only child of the Lost Daughter Collective: a fabled group of bereaved fathers who meet in an abandoned umbrella factory to mourn the loss of their girls. Over everything hangs the mystery of the Archivists daughterneither dead nor missing, but indisputably gone. Blurring the line between reality and artifice, far past and near future, Dragers satirical exploration of gender politics and identity queers the old adage: A son is a son til he finds himself a wife, but a daughter is a daughter all her life.
With allusions toAlice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz,andPeter Pan, The Lost Daughter Collectiveis a gothic fairy tale fusing the fabulism of Donald Barthleme and Ben Marcus with the language play of Rikki Ducornet and Jenny Offill.
An intelligent and densely layered story&a fleet and eerie novel, like the last strand of dream before waking.
Kirkus Reviews
The gorgeous language and urgent, controlled voice spark a complicated and cerebral narrative that contains more layers with each re-reading. &The Lost Daughter Collectiveserves as an excellent addition to the canon of modern fairy tales.
Black Warrior Review
A catalogue of paternal neglect reminiscent of macabre German cautionary tales likeMax und MoritzandDer Struwwelpeter.
Quarterly West
The Lost Daughter Collectiveis a breathtaking book, an examination of loss in all of its heartbreaking forms and the stories that keep that loss alive. Drager's writing, the crystalline beauty of her sentences, renders these stories that much more wondrous. It's hard to accurately pinpoint just how she makes this novel encompasl³*
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