REVIEW

The award-winning chapbook The Missing Girl by Jacqueline Doyle stuns with its sharp prose and astute understanding of human psychology.

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Weighing in far beyond its twenty-eight pages, this collection offers readers a feast—a veritable turducken of literature: a psychological thriller tucked inside a true-crime novel brilliantly folded into the form of eight flash fictions. In the titular story, the first in the collection, Doyle lures us with a first person narrator—a man, we soon realize—who ponders the flyer of a missing girl. Surely, we naively think, the narrator is as concerned as we are over the disappearance of tiny 14-year-old Eula Johnson of Modesto. “You feel like you know the girl,” the narrator says. We nod along, picturing a vulnerable child without her adults walking down a long, deserted road after school. Then, he says, “Just the kind to go missing.” Yes, we nod again—but. . . wait . . . no. Is there a “kind” of girl ripe for going missing? Hold on. What is the narrator asking us to agree to? Who is this guy? But it’s too late. Doyle has us now. We’ve been fly-trapped in the mind of a narrator who is not as harmless as he first seemed.

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In fact, assumptions will get you nowhere quick in this collection’s sticky, complicated, all-too-familiar world where alcohol flows too freely and slut-shaming abounds. Horrific crimes occur, but Doyle kindly spares us from violence on the page. This book isn’t about witnessing people at their lowest moments; it’s about how psyches soothe themselves, for better or worse, with self-narrative. It's about how seemingly innocent stories, even compliments, can become weapons.

 

We watch, gobsmacked, as Doyle twists and turns her characters through situation after problematic situation. They tell all sorts of tales about the events that surround them—either to avoid the pain of reality or the consequence of actions. Brains leap to lies and half-truths. Events are misremembered. One girl tries to believe she won’t end up sleeping with the douchey dude she’s leaving a bar with. Another isn’t quite sure if she tortured a childhood friend or not. Victims live in a disassociated haze. Aggressors concoct acrobatic explanations about how they’re the real victim. All the while, Doyle stands by our side, asking us why we’re so willing to trust a good story, why we’re so primed to believe—a haunting question that will keep us coming back to this collection, again and again.

 

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Book Details

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Published by Black Lawrence Press. The volume is 5.5”x 8.5” and is comprised of 30 pages including acknowledgements. The book cover has a soft-touch coating that gives the book a luxy almost velvet feel. The paper is a lovely cream and delightfully smooth.​​

 

The Missing Girl can be purchased here.