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Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body
Meet Margaret. At age twelve, she was head detective of the mystery club Girls Can Solve Anything. Margaret and her three best friends led exciting lives solving crimes, having adventures, and laughing a lot. But now that she's entered high school, the club has disbanded, and Margaret is unmoored--she doesn't want to grow up, and she wishes her friends wouldn't either. Instead, she opts out, developing an eating disorder that quickly takes over her life. When she lands in a treatment center, Margaret finds her path to recovery twisting sideways as she pursues a string of new mysteries involving a ghost, a hidden passage, disturbing desires, and her own vexed relationship with herself. Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body reimagines nineties adolescence--mashing up girl group series, choose-your-own-adventures, and chronicles of anorexia--in a queer and trans coming-of-age tale like no other. An interrogation of girlhood and nostalgia, dysmorphia and dysphoria, this debut novel puzzles through the weird, ever-evasive questions of growing up.
256 pages, Paperback
First published September 14, 2021
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September 18, 2021
OUT NOW!
I wrote this! Again and again for ~15 years. Forthcoming September 14, 2021. You can preorder here: https://www.feministpress.org/books-a...
Thanks to the following writers for the generosity of their endorsements! <3
“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
“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
“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 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
“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
“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 wrote this! Again and again for ~15 years. Forthcoming September 14, 2021. You can preorder here: https://www.feministpress.org/books-a...
Thanks to the following writers for the generosity of their endorsements! <3
“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
“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
“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 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
“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
“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
November 13, 2021
One of the most unique books I've ever read! It's at once a reimagining of tween girl series like the Babysitter's Club (a paranormal girl detective club a la first season Buffy), a brutally honest YA novel about a queer / trans coming of age and disordered eating, a choose your own adventure / video game level style surreal metaphorical journey through the body, and an intellectual adult reflection on all this. It is truly many books in one.
Wonderfully imaginative, thoughtfully intertextual, emotionally resonant, critically 90s nostalgic. I'll be thinking about this book for a long time. It's a one of a kind masterpiece in the same vein as Sybil Lamb's I've Got a Time Bomb and Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars by Kai Cheng Thom. Wildly weird and thought-provoking.
Content warning for lots of stuff re: eating disorders.
Wonderfully imaginative, thoughtfully intertextual, emotionally resonant, critically 90s nostalgic. I'll be thinking about this book for a long time. It's a one of a kind masterpiece in the same vein as Sybil Lamb's I've Got a Time Bomb and Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars by Kai Cheng Thom. Wildly weird and thought-provoking.
Content warning for lots of stuff re: eating disorders.
April 4, 2023
whew. this book is a trip. in the beginning it reads like a 1990s historical fiction romp, cycling between the life of troubled 16 year old margaret and flashbacks to her days as a kid detective in the Girls Can Solve Anything club. but around the halfway mark it takes a turn when she is admitted into a treatment center for her eating disorder. she remains in treatment for most of the rest of the book. then the story finishes with a letter written years later, in a retrospective adult voice, and is it margaret talking now, or is it megan milks themselves?
the book is honestly an amazing ride. we follow margaret through changes in tense and in POV, delineating these different areas of her life. while her disordered eating is apparent from the start, it seems at first like an unimportant side issue, until she can no longer escape the reality of the dysfunction and it consumes her. it's impressive that margaret is always unmistakably the same person, even amidst all the shifts in writing style throughout the book.
my favorite part is the nostalgia trip in the first half of the book. there are chapters that follow 90s kid detective paperback formulas, complete with wacky titles, cliché background exposition, and frequent references to other volumes in the "series" of the Girls Can Solve Anything club. but they continually allude to darker mysteries, real ghosts and girls with powers and true stories of abuse and neglect.
in the eponymous section of the mystery of the missing body, the girls' client is a walking brain with no body, and no one bats an eye. this casual absurdity is fun, but also hints at dark unrealities and ghosts to come in margaret's future. i think the shaky realism is fantastic. these elements of the story also remind me of meddling kids, which is also a dark and sometimes bleak take on a kid sleuth classic.
and the Girls Can Solve Anything club is wonderful. they have customized fanny packs with personalized tools for each member of the group!! it's sweet and nostalgic as hell, complete with the bittersweetness of knowing that a few years later, the girls' friendships will have dissolved, like many preteen bonds.
there are also painful twinges of confused attraction, undefined homoeroticism and subtle homophobia:
toward the end there's a section which is a trippy ass magic schoolbus body horror journey, heavy with symbolism and full of graphic descriptions. this section was not a fun read, but by the time i got to it, i was already deeply committed to seeing margaret's journey through.
and i'm glad i did, because the final section gave me a much better understanding of the book as a whole. finally we have an adult voice, speaking in analysis of their own story, almost like a critical author's note. it's so self-referential, it really blurs all the lines between fictionalized self, memoir, autofiction, and all the rest.
there is sapphic subtext and trans subtext throughout the book, and it puzzled me a bit as i was reading. i kept expecting it veer into explicitly trans representation, but no, it's the 90s. trans kids of the 90s often didn't have the language or resources to identify themselves as trans.
i am both glad and regretful that i didn't know much about megan milks before i began this book. if i'd known they themselves are transmasculine, i would have projected that onto margaret, and probably had a better understanding of the book. but according to the final section, "where detective fiction promises knowledge and order, this story is aligned with unknowing." the vague subtext is a crucial part of the reading experience, the mystery of it all.
the book is honestly an amazing ride. we follow margaret through changes in tense and in POV, delineating these different areas of her life. while her disordered eating is apparent from the start, it seems at first like an unimportant side issue, until she can no longer escape the reality of the dysfunction and it consumes her. it's impressive that margaret is always unmistakably the same person, even amidst all the shifts in writing style throughout the book.
my favorite part is the nostalgia trip in the first half of the book. there are chapters that follow 90s kid detective paperback formulas, complete with wacky titles, cliché background exposition, and frequent references to other volumes in the "series" of the Girls Can Solve Anything club. but they continually allude to darker mysteries, real ghosts and girls with powers and true stories of abuse and neglect.
in the eponymous section of the mystery of the missing body, the girls' client is a walking brain with no body, and no one bats an eye. this casual absurdity is fun, but also hints at dark unrealities and ghosts to come in margaret's future. i think the shaky realism is fantastic. these elements of the story also remind me of meddling kids, which is also a dark and sometimes bleak take on a kid sleuth classic.
and the Girls Can Solve Anything club is wonderful. they have customized fanny packs with personalized tools for each member of the group!! it's sweet and nostalgic as hell, complete with the bittersweetness of knowing that a few years later, the girls' friendships will have dissolved, like many preteen bonds.
there are also painful twinges of confused attraction, undefined homoeroticism and subtle homophobia:
I had since deduced I wasn't supposed to tell my friends what they meant to me, or thank them for how their hair smelled like their name. These were criminal acts. Though other girls treated one another with tenderness and appreciation, I understood it was somehow suspicious when I did.
toward the end there's a section which is a trippy ass magic schoolbus body horror journey, heavy with symbolism and full of graphic descriptions. this section was not a fun read, but by the time i got to it, i was already deeply committed to seeing margaret's journey through.
and i'm glad i did, because the final section gave me a much better understanding of the book as a whole. finally we have an adult voice, speaking in analysis of their own story, almost like a critical author's note. it's so self-referential, it really blurs all the lines between fictionalized self, memoir, autofiction, and all the rest.
there is sapphic subtext and trans subtext throughout the book, and it puzzled me a bit as i was reading. i kept expecting it veer into explicitly trans representation, but no, it's the 90s. trans kids of the 90s often didn't have the language or resources to identify themselves as trans.
I seek to haunt narratives of the young girl - at least, the ones I grew up with - with the queer and gender-queer and trans girls and maybe-not-girls they leave out: so many missing bodies. The butch and the genderqueer, the not-yet-transmasculine and the not-yet-transfeminine, are ghosts in that body of Girl Lit. Hovering between presence and absence, barely visible, inchoate, not knowing where they fit or if they fit anywhere at all.
i am both glad and regretful that i didn't know much about megan milks before i began this book. if i'd known they themselves are transmasculine, i would have projected that onto margaret, and probably had a better understanding of the book. but according to the final section, "where detective fiction promises knowledge and order, this story is aligned with unknowing." the vague subtext is a crucial part of the reading experience, the mystery of it all.
November 13, 2021
What a marvel of a book.
Every time I thought I had it figured out it morphed into something else entirely. This is something I've encountered in other novels, but Milks really takes you by surprise because she starts you out in what will be the hyper-familiar for readers like myself who remember The Baby-Sitters Club and all the other series mysteries tweens read in the 90's. You do not expect a novel with adorable tween sleuths to also be a book that tackles a stay in an inpatient eating disorder clinic or one that gives you a kind of queer manifesto to tie everything together. And yet, with all these seeming-disparate parts, I found the impact of them all together to just about knock me off my feet.
I loved the mashup of surrealism with hyper-realism, the way you can go within a single paragraph from the absolute tedium of everyday life to something absurd that is treated as absolutely normal. That playfulness and the willingness to keep the reader a bit off kilter helps Milks with the bigger transitions of genre and style as we move through the plot. It is sort of middle-grade and sort of young adult and sort of none of these things, not willing to be in one particular category. It embraces and also defies the expectations of all the genres it lives in. Even the ending, which could have fallen very flat if not done well, was a moving way to tie up all the threads and put them together. Milks doesn't want us to miss what is happening, they want us to see what they've just given us fully, and it really worked for me.
I am certainly a good reader for this book, it referenced so much that was familiar from my own adolescence as a girl who hadn't even come close to conceiving of my own queerness yet. I related to so many aspects of young Margaret's take charge confidence. I could have read the first section of this book forever, but that's not how life works. That adolescent confidence fades into the horrors of being a teenager, and Milks wants to move us through all kinds of narratives about girlhood, about growing up, about discovering identity by mashing genres together in unexpected ways.
This reminded me of a lot of books while I was reading it in the best way. Not just those BSC books, but Daniel Lavery's Something That May Shock and Discredit You, Drew Magary's The Hike, Melissa Broder's Milk Fed. Other books that challenge genre expectations and consider bodies both within and outside of societal expectations. I knew this was a queer book going in, but it is not a queer book that announces itself. Instead it unfolded a lot like the way it does in real life for many of us, with lots of little signals that you won't pick up if you're not looking for them, and Margaret, of course, is not.
There is A LOT of disordered eating in this book. It's a major theme, both the practice of it and the treatment of it. Like everything in this book it is both literal act and metaphorical symbol, but it is not a casual theme, it is a major plot element that makes up a majority of the novel.
As always I like to include in my write-ups of queer novels how much queer suffering is involved and the answer here is not much! There is definitely a lot of exploration of identity, of not understanding your own queerness yet, and of a hatred of and/or a need to control one's body. Margaret's loneliness and dysphoria are in part because of her queer identity but also they are part of existing in the world when you're brought up as a girl.
Every time I thought I had it figured out it morphed into something else entirely. This is something I've encountered in other novels, but Milks really takes you by surprise because she starts you out in what will be the hyper-familiar for readers like myself who remember The Baby-Sitters Club and all the other series mysteries tweens read in the 90's. You do not expect a novel with adorable tween sleuths to also be a book that tackles a stay in an inpatient eating disorder clinic or one that gives you a kind of queer manifesto to tie everything together. And yet, with all these seeming-disparate parts, I found the impact of them all together to just about knock me off my feet.
I loved the mashup of surrealism with hyper-realism, the way you can go within a single paragraph from the absolute tedium of everyday life to something absurd that is treated as absolutely normal. That playfulness and the willingness to keep the reader a bit off kilter helps Milks with the bigger transitions of genre and style as we move through the plot. It is sort of middle-grade and sort of young adult and sort of none of these things, not willing to be in one particular category. It embraces and also defies the expectations of all the genres it lives in. Even the ending, which could have fallen very flat if not done well, was a moving way to tie up all the threads and put them together. Milks doesn't want us to miss what is happening, they want us to see what they've just given us fully, and it really worked for me.
I am certainly a good reader for this book, it referenced so much that was familiar from my own adolescence as a girl who hadn't even come close to conceiving of my own queerness yet. I related to so many aspects of young Margaret's take charge confidence. I could have read the first section of this book forever, but that's not how life works. That adolescent confidence fades into the horrors of being a teenager, and Milks wants to move us through all kinds of narratives about girlhood, about growing up, about discovering identity by mashing genres together in unexpected ways.
This reminded me of a lot of books while I was reading it in the best way. Not just those BSC books, but Daniel Lavery's Something That May Shock and Discredit You, Drew Magary's The Hike, Melissa Broder's Milk Fed. Other books that challenge genre expectations and consider bodies both within and outside of societal expectations. I knew this was a queer book going in, but it is not a queer book that announces itself. Instead it unfolded a lot like the way it does in real life for many of us, with lots of little signals that you won't pick up if you're not looking for them, and Margaret, of course, is not.
There is A LOT of disordered eating in this book. It's a major theme, both the practice of it and the treatment of it. Like everything in this book it is both literal act and metaphorical symbol, but it is not a casual theme, it is a major plot element that makes up a majority of the novel.
As always I like to include in my write-ups of queer novels how much queer suffering is involved and the answer here is not much! There is definitely a lot of exploration of identity, of not understanding your own queerness yet, and of a hatred of and/or a need to control one's body. Margaret's loneliness and dysphoria are in part because of her queer identity but also they are part of existing in the world when you're brought up as a girl.
March 7, 2022
Loved this!!! A perfect, weird, unlike anything else kind of book. A pre-coming out, trying to be a “good girl” trans masterpiece.
CW: eating disorders (and everything related)
CW: eating disorders (and everything related)
December 22, 2021
4.5
The December pick of the Nervous Breakdown Book Club is a prime example of the kind of book I’m pleased they chose, because I likely wouldn’t have read it otherwise.
In service to serious topics, the author uses as playful inspiration their (mostly 1990’s) literary heritage, including the Baby-Sitters Club series, which I know because my daughter read them; Girl, Interrupted, the memoir as well as the movie version, neither of which I know well but knew enough of to recognize; and (I think) Choose Your Own Adventure stories combined with videogames (levels), things I know enough of because of my children. In other words, even though the reference points aren’t of my generation, I found a lot to relate to, even if it is secondhand. I’m sure I missed many allusions (as I started to listen to the interview with the author, I learned of another concerning Fiona Apple) and I can imagine how brilliant all this might be for those of my children’s generation.
I got a tiny bit bogged down in the final section, which touches on theoretical concepts about anorexia and gender I’m not familiar with, but could easily look up if I wanted more information. It ends on a perfect poignant note (which I now know also alludes to the aforementioned Fiona Apple-tidbit, but that knowledge isn’t needed for its effectiveness).
The December pick of the Nervous Breakdown Book Club is a prime example of the kind of book I’m pleased they chose, because I likely wouldn’t have read it otherwise.
In service to serious topics, the author uses as playful inspiration their (mostly 1990’s) literary heritage, including the Baby-Sitters Club series, which I know because my daughter read them; Girl, Interrupted, the memoir as well as the movie version, neither of which I know well but knew enough of to recognize; and (I think) Choose Your Own Adventure stories combined with videogames (levels), things I know enough of because of my children. In other words, even though the reference points aren’t of my generation, I found a lot to relate to, even if it is secondhand. I’m sure I missed many allusions (as I started to listen to the interview with the author, I learned of another concerning Fiona Apple) and I can imagine how brilliant all this might be for those of my children’s generation.
I got a tiny bit bogged down in the final section, which touches on theoretical concepts about anorexia and gender I’m not familiar with, but could easily look up if I wanted more information. It ends on a perfect poignant note (which I now know also alludes to the aforementioned Fiona Apple-tidbit, but that knowledge isn’t needed for its effectiveness).
November 18, 2021
The kind of book that unhinged my skull, rearranged the furniture, and dusted my bookshelves while giving me a tender lesson on the possibilities of queer literature. I love it so fucking much. Read this if you've ever been lonely, not wanted to grow up, felt on the outside of things, found your home, lost your home, found a different home, and fought hard to hold onto it before realizing that sometimes all you have to do to keep it is relax.
December 14, 2021
transcendent. broke me open. how do i write about a book like this? how do i write about a life like this? a knowing smile, a slap in the face, the terrifying spectacle of embodiment and existence and love, always love. i think i need to lie down for a while
November 14, 2021
Megan Milks' Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body is a sort of chimera, made of disparate parts that don't seem to belong together, yet they do. The publisher's blurb for the book describes it as a reimagining of "nineties adolescence—mashing up girl group series, choose-your-own-adventures, and chronicles of anorexia—in a queer and trans coming-of-age tale like no other. An interrogation of girlhood and nostalgia, dysmorphia and dysphoria, this debut novel puzzles through the weird, ever-evasive questions of growing up." The parts of this mash-up/chimera include
• The story of the title's Margaret, whose friends are abandoning their "Girls Can Solve Anything Club" detective team as they move onto high school and Margaret's worsening eating disorder.
• Write-ups of the club's case files that could inspire any number of episodes of The X Files.
• Margaret's time in a residential facility that treats eating disorders.
• A sequence in which the facility's resident ghost lures Margaret and two of her friends to a lecture on the history of the U.S. women's suffrage movement.
• A journey following that lecture that takes Margaret and company through a gigantic digestive tract.
• A complex reflection in what I assume to be Milks' own voice considering issues of gender and identity that draws on recent research in the field, and which uses a voice that is simultaneously personal and academic.
Basically, it's a wild ride that demands a lot from readers, but that also delivers a rich kind of complexity that a simpler structure simply couldn't offer. Put in the work and you'll reap the benefits. I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via Edelweiss; the opinions are my own.
• The story of the title's Margaret, whose friends are abandoning their "Girls Can Solve Anything Club" detective team as they move onto high school and Margaret's worsening eating disorder.
• Write-ups of the club's case files that could inspire any number of episodes of The X Files.
• Margaret's time in a residential facility that treats eating disorders.
• A sequence in which the facility's resident ghost lures Margaret and two of her friends to a lecture on the history of the U.S. women's suffrage movement.
• A journey following that lecture that takes Margaret and company through a gigantic digestive tract.
• A complex reflection in what I assume to be Milks' own voice considering issues of gender and identity that draws on recent research in the field, and which uses a voice that is simultaneously personal and academic.
Basically, it's a wild ride that demands a lot from readers, but that also delivers a rich kind of complexity that a simpler structure simply couldn't offer. Put in the work and you'll reap the benefits. I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via Edelweiss; the opinions are my own.
March 26, 2023
Brilliant. This is an inventive, unique, experimental work that was reminiscent to me of Carmen Maria Machado in the way it plays with genre and form. Part girl-gang fantasy mystery club, part autofiction, part coming-of-age set at an eating disorder clinic, part…horror? Ish? It explores eating disorders through such an interesting lens - is it an act of protest? As an act of transformation, how does it compare to transition? It explores eating disorders with a trans eye, and is just so clever and weird and altogether brilliant. This is a coming-of-age story about the girls missing from coming-of-age narratives, about trying to find out how you fit into a world that tells you how you should exist. I particularly loved this passage from near the end of the book:
“I seek to haunt narratives of the young girl - at least, the ones I grew up with - with the queer and genderqueer and trans girls and maybe-not-girls they leave out: so many missing bodies. The butch and the genderqueer, the not-yet-transmasculine and the not-yet-transfeminine, are ghosts in that body of Girl Lit. Hovering between presence and absence, barely visible, inchoate, not knowing where they fit or if they fit anywhere at all.”
“I seek to haunt narratives of the young girl - at least, the ones I grew up with - with the queer and genderqueer and trans girls and maybe-not-girls they leave out: so many missing bodies. The butch and the genderqueer, the not-yet-transmasculine and the not-yet-transfeminine, are ghosts in that body of Girl Lit. Hovering between presence and absence, barely visible, inchoate, not knowing where they fit or if they fit anywhere at all.”
February 7, 2024
Six out of five stars, at least. I sprinted through this book in one sitting, as if my life depended on it. And perhaps it did. Milks maps a new and smart and deeply true mythology of disorderly & noncompliant embodiment, a nexus of embodied and embodied resistance that has ample space for the complexities of our historical, social, and political realities. It’s true: disorderly eaters are scary. We’re smart, we’re capable, even magic. We are tender, even as we are sharp.
This book is praiseworthy for so many reasons: its disruption of form and genre expectations, its ingenious incorporation of research and multimedia intertext. It’s self-aware subversion of the demand for legible Mad story, even while it delivers precisely the story so many of us need, feel, find inexpressible. But more than anything, I honor and feel honored by the tenderness and respect Milks shows our shared experiences; the trust they embed in each page that those of us who need this story will handle it with the dignity we have not been afforded by our own Briarwoods.
I know without a doubt that Margaret will live permanently in my personal canon, and become one of those texts that I give others in an earnest effort to borrow words and, in the process, approximate who and how I am.
This book is praiseworthy for so many reasons: its disruption of form and genre expectations, its ingenious incorporation of research and multimedia intertext. It’s self-aware subversion of the demand for legible Mad story, even while it delivers precisely the story so many of us need, feel, find inexpressible. But more than anything, I honor and feel honored by the tenderness and respect Milks shows our shared experiences; the trust they embed in each page that those of us who need this story will handle it with the dignity we have not been afforded by our own Briarwoods.
I know without a doubt that Margaret will live permanently in my personal canon, and become one of those texts that I give others in an earnest effort to borrow words and, in the process, approximate who and how I am.
January 29, 2022
The December pick of the Nervous Breakdown Book Club brought out in me all of my methods of avoidance. It sat on my shelf for over a month, its cover grossing me out. When I finally cracked it open, I was mostly through the Otherppl podcast interview with the author and somewhat prepared for what Megan Milks was going to put me through. I was in no way prepared for what Megan Milks went through.
I finished it last night in awe of what this author achieved. I tried for much of my life to be what Megan tried to be and I avoided most of what goes on in this book. Fiona Apple was not in my wheelhouse even if she was a female singer songwriter of great talent. Still, I had all the issues: body image, trying to be pretty and desirable to boys/men, needing a relationship with a male to be sure I was ok, all the while hiding from my parents and partners and myself who I really am.
I am white, I am heterosexual, I am average in size and looks, I have talents that I failed to use to the fullest, and now I am old. I grew up in the 50s and 60s and the goal was to be as normal as possible. Here in Megan's book I came face to face with all the ways of being that I secretly wanted to know more about but was afraid and uncomfortable.
Now that I have read so much, now when it is almost too late for me, I have an inkling of the tiny little spaces society puts us in. I wish we could all break out of our present bodies into an acceptance of all the bodies there can be. Thank you Megan Milks for your valuable, imaginative and brave creation.
I finished it last night in awe of what this author achieved. I tried for much of my life to be what Megan tried to be and I avoided most of what goes on in this book. Fiona Apple was not in my wheelhouse even if she was a female singer songwriter of great talent. Still, I had all the issues: body image, trying to be pretty and desirable to boys/men, needing a relationship with a male to be sure I was ok, all the while hiding from my parents and partners and myself who I really am.
I am white, I am heterosexual, I am average in size and looks, I have talents that I failed to use to the fullest, and now I am old. I grew up in the 50s and 60s and the goal was to be as normal as possible. Here in Megan's book I came face to face with all the ways of being that I secretly wanted to know more about but was afraid and uncomfortable.
Now that I have read so much, now when it is almost too late for me, I have an inkling of the tiny little spaces society puts us in. I wish we could all break out of our present bodies into an acceptance of all the bodies there can be. Thank you Megan Milks for your valuable, imaginative and brave creation.
September 19, 2021
Really hard to describe, but very much an enjoyable read. Sort of like Babysitter’s Club meets Veronica Mars meets Ghostbusters meets Girl, Interrupted meets Judith Butler. A mashup that we never knew we needed, but yes, I think we did in fact.
Thank you to The Feminist Press for sending me a copy.
Thank you to The Feminist Press for sending me a copy.
March 26, 2022
Basically, I really disliked this book. There's such a huge disconnect between the first and second part, and there's also all of these unanswered questions, mostly "why?" to a lot of it.
January 30, 2022
3.5 - quin i'm sorry, i know you wanted me to love this. so a disclaimer - i think that objectively this book is good, i just didn't enjoy it a lot? if that makes sense
i liked:
trans main character! and i really like that they didn't always know and had in the past been certain that they were a girl and they weren't like always a tomboy, always unfeminine. there's a lot of trans characters in fiction who always felt different or always knew something about their identity is not what they've been told so this was really nice
it was weird (sometimes this was good and sometimes this was bad). i really liked how the gcsa chapters occupied that space where it isn't really contemporary/realistic fiction anymore but just one telekinetic or woman turning into a butterly doesn't quite turn it into fantasy or something either. if that makes sense. i liked the matter of fact way "a sad story: sadie had grown up with telekinetic powers but had learned to repress them through prayer" was said. like where did that come from! quite fun
i did not like
the writing didn't really agree with me & this is just personal preference but while i like weird stories i do not like weird artsy writing and i'm not really a fan of second person either. so i did not really enjoy the writing or the experience of reading wich ultimately made me round down to 3 rather than up to 4 or just rating this at 4 stars. once again - objectively this book is good, it just wasn't my style
i was often confused. what is going on? what is happening? especially in the 3rd person sections at the beginning. super confusing. and the last chapter -- it's like an epilogue and an author's note rolled into one which was kind of weird.
i liked:
trans main character! and i really like that they didn't always know and had in the past been certain that they were a girl and they weren't like always a tomboy, always unfeminine. there's a lot of trans characters in fiction who always felt different or always knew something about their identity is not what they've been told so this was really nice
it was weird (sometimes this was good and sometimes this was bad). i really liked how the gcsa chapters occupied that space where it isn't really contemporary/realistic fiction anymore but just one telekinetic or woman turning into a butterly doesn't quite turn it into fantasy or something either. if that makes sense. i liked the matter of fact way "a sad story: sadie had grown up with telekinetic powers but had learned to repress them through prayer" was said. like where did that come from! quite fun
i did not like
the writing didn't really agree with me & this is just personal preference but while i like weird stories i do not like weird artsy writing and i'm not really a fan of second person either. so i did not really enjoy the writing or the experience of reading wich ultimately made me round down to 3 rather than up to 4 or just rating this at 4 stars. once again - objectively this book is good, it just wasn't my style
i was often confused. what is going on? what is happening? especially in the 3rd person sections at the beginning. super confusing. and the last chapter -- it's like an epilogue and an author's note rolled into one which was kind of weird.
June 30, 2025
A wonderfully weird and queer exploration of "girlhood" and eating disorders.
June 8, 2024
what a book!!!!!!!!
September 10, 2021
"Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body" is a coming of age wonder, using changes in form and genre itself as containers to articulate the experience of growing up. Author Megan Milks was raised on “The Babysitter’s Club” series (going so far to co-edit a collection of adult retrospectives titled “We Are the Baby Sitters Club”), and MMMB uses that childhood nostalgia as a jumping off point. Switching back and forth between our protagonist Margaret’s middle school years as a plucky girls-can-do-anything detective and the much less fantastical high school years after everything fell apart, the story unfolds.
The book begins with a quote from Kai Cheng Thom’s “Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars” and wields the same inspired fantastical edge onto the ordinary. During Margaret’s middle school years as intrepid detectives, the extraordinary is treated as banal—a (mad) science teacher splicing her DNA with a butterfly, a brain sliming around a room hiring them to find her body. The fantastical can be solved by good detective work and girl power, with the solution and proper order of things always just a manner of following the clues. It’s the clues they’re not looking for—like fat shaming, self-hate, alienating queer desire, and gender trouble—that really indicate the things to come.
As things cease to make sense as Margaret nears the end of middle school, the body rebels too—an eating disorder being a way to exert some level of control over an external reality that resists all attempts to order it into the easy connect-the-dots story it used to be. Without giving too much away, everything leads up to a literal voyage into the human body that could have been torn from the Magic Schoolbus but with more awareness of the inherent body horror—diving into the only place away from the world that gives it meaning.
Growing up is hard—when you’re queer and maybe trans, even more so. If only I had books like this one growing up, maybe I would have found my own body a little faster.
The book begins with a quote from Kai Cheng Thom’s “Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars” and wields the same inspired fantastical edge onto the ordinary. During Margaret’s middle school years as intrepid detectives, the extraordinary is treated as banal—a (mad) science teacher splicing her DNA with a butterfly, a brain sliming around a room hiring them to find her body. The fantastical can be solved by good detective work and girl power, with the solution and proper order of things always just a manner of following the clues. It’s the clues they’re not looking for—like fat shaming, self-hate, alienating queer desire, and gender trouble—that really indicate the things to come.
As things cease to make sense as Margaret nears the end of middle school, the body rebels too—an eating disorder being a way to exert some level of control over an external reality that resists all attempts to order it into the easy connect-the-dots story it used to be. Without giving too much away, everything leads up to a literal voyage into the human body that could have been torn from the Magic Schoolbus but with more awareness of the inherent body horror—diving into the only place away from the world that gives it meaning.
Growing up is hard—when you’re queer and maybe trans, even more so. If only I had books like this one growing up, maybe I would have found my own body a little faster.
April 18, 2022
Just about everything I want to say is contained in Jessica Woodbury's astute review, which I highly recommend reading. This novel is wildly experimental, fantastic, and fantastical. I had never considered the comparison between eating disorders and gender dysphoria, but now it seems like an excellent metaphor. My greatest takeaway is that our culture makes it exceedingly unnecessarily difficult to positively relate to one's self. Maybe if we could recognize that, we could all do a lot better for each other. I'd like to think that it's possible.
This book is extraordinary and I'm grateful for the dedication of the author in getting it right.
This book is extraordinary and I'm grateful for the dedication of the author in getting it right.
October 29, 2022
I loved this novel – especially the first half with the GCSA (Girls Can Solve Anything) detective group reminiscent of The Babysitter’s Club or Nancy Drew or Goosebumps, except more queer and more absurd. I also loved the middle section where we see Margaret at seventeen; during this section, we confront her struggles with disordered eating full-on, which we’d seen the seeds of in her preteenhood. The author switches from a third-person narrative (‘she did this’ / ‘she did that’) to a rare second-person POV (‘you do this’, ‘you said that’), and then in the short, final section of the novel, framed as a letter written years later, we hear Margaret speak in a first-person “I” for the first time. I thought these subtle shifts in narrative voice were genius and captured Margaret’s estrangement-from then eventual growth-into selfhood perfectly. <3
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December 5, 2021I am 100% the reader for this book that's a dash of The Baby-Sitters Club with a dash of Milkfed with a big dose of surrealism, tied together with an exploration of queerness, of the physical body, of culture's expectations of gender and the body, and about learning to be who you are from the inside out without reservation (and whether or not that's even possible).
Margaret is our Kristy, but when we get deeper into the story, we discover Margaret has a destructive eating disorder and she's been put into a residential facility. It's there she develops some new bad relationships, not just to others but to herself more broadly. Then there's what can only be described as a Magic School Bus style trip through a body (I kept wondering if it belonged to the wandering brain) and the realizations that our insides are one thing, manifesting outwardly, and what's picked up outwardly then results to what happens inside.
It's wild. At times it's brutal. At times it's really funny (the baby-sitters club esque club Margaret and her friends started was a HOOT through and through, as was the way that Margaret described the members of the group and then how she reflected upon them as an older, more wisened adolescent).
This is for readers who are okay with disordered eating, who want something that's both extremely realistic AND surrealistic all at once. A manifesto of gender, sexuality, and what it means to be a person in today's Western world (though even that might not be entirely fair, as Milks does a tremendous job highlighting how cultures more broadly can find this applicable in their own ways).
Margaret is our Kristy, but when we get deeper into the story, we discover Margaret has a destructive eating disorder and she's been put into a residential facility. It's there she develops some new bad relationships, not just to others but to herself more broadly. Then there's what can only be described as a Magic School Bus style trip through a body (I kept wondering if it belonged to the wandering brain) and the realizations that our insides are one thing, manifesting outwardly, and what's picked up outwardly then results to what happens inside.
It's wild. At times it's brutal. At times it's really funny (the baby-sitters club esque club Margaret and her friends started was a HOOT through and through, as was the way that Margaret described the members of the group and then how she reflected upon them as an older, more wisened adolescent).
This is for readers who are okay with disordered eating, who want something that's both extremely realistic AND surrealistic all at once. A manifesto of gender, sexuality, and what it means to be a person in today's Western world (though even that might not be entirely fair, as Milks does a tremendous job highlighting how cultures more broadly can find this applicable in their own ways).
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June 21, 2024kinda thinking i'm too neurodivergent for absurdism/stuff that isn't literal. i hated this and i found the fatphobia to be triggering and rampant.
February 11, 2022
Finished Margaret a month ago, and I’m still thinking about it nearly every day. Nostalgia and queering 90s girlhood engaged me, wholly. Then I got thinking about figurative storytelling as a queer experience itself. Then I got thinking about the relationship between an author and protagonist and narrative voice. Honestly, just read this novel—it will give your brain so many gifts.
February 7, 2022
What in the queer Magic School Bus did I just read...
March 23, 2022
I respected the hell out of this, it's really brilliant, but wow did I not like it.
May 8, 2022
This book was so good and incredible and good. The final chapter that offers the idea that this book is not an adult book because it is willing to commit the crime of adolescent questioning is so perfect to offer us the reason to every “why” you might ask as you read. A book that is nearly half dialogue of questions we won’t get answers to has to be *so good* to be good: Should I have known? Could I have known? I’ve never related so much to a protagonist and also known nothing about them or what it would be like to be them. I’m gonna think about this book for the rest of my life.
January 26, 2025
Again I had trouble differentiating what's real and what's metaphorical.. at the same time easy and so hard to read :')
September 28, 2024
this was a mindfuck. in a good way
February 16, 2024
mała margaret oh i love you so much, lost me a bit in the second half, but i guess she lost herself too, so that makes sense, każdy rozdział, gdy działo się coś fantastycznego wspaniały, megan milks wie jak to się robi, pozostaję fanką osoby autorskiej, mimo że książka nie była wszystkim, czym liczyłam, że będzie
October 8, 2021
I couldn't put down this beautiful, funny, theoretical, heartfelt novel. MATMOFMB pushes out into it's own territory: part homage to 90s girl culture, part teen mystery series, part deep dive into not only what it means to have a body but what it means to leave childhood behind, whether we are ready for it or not. Milks makes bold formal moves while keeping the heart located firmly in the body. The last note of the book broke my heart and made the titular missing body visible though irrevocably lost. Milks is an exciting writer--we're so lucky of the abundance coming our way this Fall.
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