In the opening chapter of Madeline Cash’s debut novel, Lost Lambs, we first meet Father Andrew and his pieties, a sardonic list of pettinesses worthy of his station:
The gnat situation in the church was getting out of hand. It was Miss Winkle’s fault, she had brought the gnats and this was unforgivable, not in the eyes of God but those of Father Andrew, who was unable to extermignate the gnats, not for lack of trying—he’d employed every trap, spray, and swatter on the modern market—and yet his efforts had little effect on the greater gnat population. If anything, it was growing. Father Andrew imagined that soon the gnats might attract a larger pest—gnat-eating spiders, perhaps—which might attract, say, frogs, which might attract rats, which might attract cats, which might attract coyotes, which might attract a larger coyote-eating mammal, and so on and so forth. It was Miss Winkle’s fault because Miss Winkle had brought the plant into the church, “like God did on the third day…!”
Father Andrew’s pettiness presents a playground in which Harper, a young, promising girl, might play, her favored equipment duplicity, sarcasm and vaping. When asked if she has renounced her faith, she quips back that her “virtue is post-theocratic.”
Cash’s comedic timing is delicious, made more so by a driving tension and dark, foreboding horizon that young Harper must certainly be on. There is no doubt that the first chapter opens with a fun grab and jostle, catapulting you onto the next. Highly recommended reading.
About Madeline Cash
Madeline Cash is the coeditor of Forever Magazine and the author of the story collection Earth Angel. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, The Baffler, The Sewanee Review, The Drift, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City. Read more.
About Lost Lambs
The Flynn family is coming undone. Catherine and Bud’s open marriage has reached its breaking point as their daughters spiral in their own chaotic orbits: Abigail, the eldest, is dating a man in his twenties nicknamed War Crime Wes; Louise, the middle child, maintains a secret correspondence with an online terrorist; the brilliant youngest, Harper, is being sent to wilderness reform camp due to her insistence that someone—or something—is monitoring the town’s citizens.
Casting a shadow across their lives, and their small coastal town, is Paul Alabaster, a billionaire shipping magnate. Rumors of corruption circulate, but no one dares dig too deep. No one except Harper, whose obsession with a mysterious shipping container sends the family hurtling into a criminal conspiracy—one that may just bring them closer together.
Irreverent and addictive, pinging between the voices of the Flynn family and those of the panorama of characters around them, Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs is a debut novel of quick-witted observation and surprising tenderness. With it, Cash has crafted a family saga for the twenty-first century, all held together with crazy glue. Read more at Macmillan Publishers.
