From the Publisher
Finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Fiction
"Girl detectives, adolescent angst, all soundtracked to Fiona Apple—Milks's first novel is a mid-'90s marvel, one that acutely captures the surreal Tidal-wave of teenage emotions and the "private heat" of girlhood." —Oprah Daily
"As much a joyful romp as it is a serious exploration of coming of age (no matter how old you are), mental illness, and identity. . . . A page-turner." —Shondaland
“A delightfully weird and very queer reimagining of 90s YA nostalgia.” —Autostraddle
“Lambda-nominated Megan Milks has knocked this coming-of-age meditation out of the park, blending magical realism with tween nostalgia and teen angst, resulting in a totally accurate-feeling account of the chaos of growing up.” —Booklist, starred review
"Emotionally complex and illuminating" —Publishers Weekly
“Megan Milks blends mystery, comedy and nostalgia with feminism, queerness and politics to imagine the perfect ‘90s coming of age debut. It’s both super-smart and super-fun.” —Ms.
“Milks’s highly experimental, genre-bending writing is a living thing: a corporeal shapeshifter, appropriately for texts about navigating transness, queerness, and the endlessly weird experience of being sentient, bodied, and desiring.” —BOMB
“Finally, here is a story that includes, among many elements, the ways in which body dysmorphia and gender dysphoria intersect and interact… Moving, fun, funny, and hella queer.” —them.
“Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body is queer dynamite. I devoured this book in one sitting, completely engrossed by the wild plot and by Megan Milks’s stellar, singular voice. This is a book of bodies, sure, but it’s also a book about the messiness of them, their complications and intractability, their frustrating unknowability. Their mutability. Their wonder. This novel is a bright spot of brilliance. I absolutely adored it.” —Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Things
“Three cheers for Margaret Worms! I wish I could go back to 1995 and slip this book into the lockers of all my high school friends (and enemies). Mostly I wish I could give it to teen me. Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body is a brilliant kaleidoscope of nineties teen serials and coming-of-age novels, queer theory, and even a ghost story, and it all comes together in one delicious, surreal, endlessly inventive (and funny! and wise!) page-turner. I just loved this novel and can’t wait to see what Milks writes next.” —emily m. danforth, author of Plain Bad Heroines
“What if all those nineties book series about girlhood had been truly honest about the process of growing up? You’d get this wonderful book: a comforting facade that opens into an entrancing and wildly innovative gut-renovation of the genre, with an interior that lays bare the hidden workings of life I wish I’d known on my own first run through adolescence. Brilliant.” —Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
“I tore through this book in a day and was still thinking about it weeks later. It’s the smartest novel I’ve read in a long time and the most politically astute. Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body is a coming-of-age novel about growing up through coming-of-age narratives, then reappropriating those narratives from the inside and writing your own freedom. It’s also compulsively readable, hugely moving, and more fun than the pop classics it makes free with. Magnificent.” —Sandra Newman, author of The Heavens
"Megan Milks's Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body is both delightfully strange and deeply familiar. The classic female coming-of-age novel is not simply queered; the casual horror of it is made manifest with a powerful imagination, both playful and sinister, sweet and surreal and emotionally real. I loved this deceptively fun book." —Michelle Tea, author of Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms
“Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body, a thrilling and surprising crystallization of the best and worst parts of growing up in the nineties, lit up all of the pleasure receptors in my brain. It’s intimate, fearless, and a funhouse of form and style. Megan Milks is a supremely generous writer whose work is daring and alive.” —Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
“Megan Milks has combined the boundlessness of speculative fiction, the raucous joys and radical presence of YA storytelling, and the ingenuity of an avant-garde sensibility with such damn good lyric prose that it made me grin more times than I can count. Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body retrieves the thrill of early novel reading from the corridors of memory and infuses it into a book that is genuinely unique, entirely new, and frankly delightful.” —Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
“Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body is a shapeshifter of a novel: an adventure story, a feminist critique, and a note from your best friend. Every time it changes form, it magically, seamlessly changes feeling. You never know what’s coming next, and it’s always just right.” —Sofia Samatar, author of A Stranger in Olondria
“One of the brashest, brainiest, funniest, most electric novels I’ve read in years, containing one of the most winning protagonists to ever bless queer fiction in the character of Margaret Worms. Milks smashes up genres in a glorious free-for-all and emerges with a genuine masterpiece.” —Casey Plett, author of Little Fish
Kirkus Reviews
2021-07-10
Nancy Drew meets The Baby-Sitters Club meets Girl, Interrupted by way of Judith Butler.
This elaborately constructed novel begins with 16-year-old Margaret in her car, listening to Fiona Apple, obsessing about food, and sadly reminiscing about the club for junior detectives she led as a tween. Her one-time friends have long outgrown amateur sleuthing, but Margaret hasn’t found a new identity for herself since Girls Can Solve Anything disbanded. Margaret has become a mystery to herself. After this prelude, the narrative takes us back to a happier time, a time when the mysteries Margaret confronted were much easier to solve. “The Case of the Stolen Specimens” centers on the theft of rare butterflies from the local botanical garden. After beginning in a realist mode, Milks takes a hard left into science fiction. It turns out that the thief Girls Can Solve Anything has been hunting is using butterfly DNA to turn herself into a bug. The case that gives this book its title involves a client who wakes up to discover that she no longer has a body. When the novel shifts gears again, Margaret is in a residential treatment program for teens struggling with disordered eating. And, once again, a realist narrative opens up to the fantastic. The facility where Margaret is staying is haunted, and a ghost leads her and two other patients on a terrifying quest. The final portion of the text is, essentially, an essay explaining the novel. It’s here we learn that the protagonist we met as Margaret no longer identifies as a woman. What Milks presents here is thought-provoking, but the novel they’ve written never quite coheres as the project they describe. “What is the difference between the fantasy of anorexic body mastery and the magic of hormone-based transition? I don’t know,” Milks writes. It’s fine to not know, but it’s odd to append this very interesting question at the end of a novel where it might have been more thoroughly explored. There are a few moments in which we see Margaret struggle with her sexuality and question her gender, but those moments get trampled by distractions like a disembodied brain and a spectral suffragette. The ultimate problem is that the fantastical apparatus doesn’t help the reader understand the novel’s central character; instead, it pushes the reader further away from understanding.
A fascinating concept that might have been a terrific novel.
