The Lost Daughter Collective

January 30, 2017
Drager (The Sorrow Paper) mixes fairy tale and gender politics into her novel of interlinked fictions about father, daughters, and how we tell stories. In these sections fathers tell stories to daughters, fathers lose daughters, and fathers realize sometimes that maybe they never had daughters at all. While the language of folktale is often invoked, including allusions to Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, Drager also trades in stranger logic as well: scholars of “wrist studies,” “cold art methodology,” “museums of paternal understanding,” and more. The stories connect to form a greater whole, yet many feel isolated as well; characters reappear and shift throughout; and sometimes very short sections also include diagrams, textual trickery, and epigraphs. The themes include father-daughter relationships, but also the nature of storytelling as a gendered art and the way that texts can be misread through both scholarship and their own tellings. Ultimately, Drager’s book is clever and formally rich, but a palpable coldness remains—the layers seem to distance the characters more than illuminate them.

December 15, 2016
Drager's (The Sorrow Proper, 2015) spare, ethereal second novel is equal parts dark fairy tale, philosophical exploration of time and schema, and academic satire. "Imagine a room full of daughters. How is it different than a room full of girls?" On the eve of her fifth birthday, the daughter of the Wrist Scholar waits for her father to make his brief middle-of-the-night visit to her bedroom to tell her stories of the Lost Daughter Collective. Lending a touch of the medieval to the ominous future Drager invokes, the girl will grow up to be known solely by her occupation, the Ice Sculptor, like her father and the men who form the Collective--The Woodsman, The Archivist, The Wainwright--whose daughters fall into one of two categories: Alices (missing) or Dorothies (dead). As the stories of the Collective members weave around those of the girl and her father, the perspective begins to shift and the timeline destabilizes, turns inside out, until it is no longer the Wrist Scholar telling stories of the Collective to his daughter but the men who will someday form the Collective telling stories of the Ice Sculptor to their not-yet-lost daughters. What was present has become past or the past and present exist simultaneously, nestle and curl into one another, until at last the daughters claim narrative dominance. Drager meditates on our means and motives for telling stories, highlighting the ways in which tenor and content shift depending on the teller. Though references to various literary figures, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Virginia Woolf, may be a bit on-the-nose for some readers, and occasionally a point is whacked with a heavy and earnest hammer, overall the book delivers an intelligent and densely layered story. A fleet and eerie novel, like the last strand of dream before waking.

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