Review by Booklist Review
Margaret was once a gifted girl detective and president of the Girls Can Solve Anything club. With her best friends by her side, no caper was too complicated. Now, as a teenager, nothing makes sense. Her friends, older brother, and peers constantly make irresponsible decisions that confound Margaret, but it's her own body that becomes the ultimate subject of confusion. She develops a serious eating disorder, and her friends are too involved with their own reckless lives to notice. After a full spin out of control, Margaret enters in-patient treatment, where she finally meets people with whom she can have deep, meaningful conversations about how bogus it can be to grow up. Within the world of the treatment facility, Margaret feels more like herself than she has since the peak of the Girls Can Solve Anything club--she's even investigating mysteries again. The only thing left for Margaret to solve is how to merge all of the parts of herself into one whole person, not defined by body or material. Lambda-nominated 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.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Milks's engaging debut novel (after the collection Kill Marguerite) blends the tropes of classic girl fiction like Nancy Drew with a 16-year-old sleuth's tumultuous exploration of her queer identity. Margaret Worms, president of the Girls Can Solve Anything club, now spends her days alone, operating as the club's sole remaining member in an attempt to forget her now-fractured friendships and developing anorexia. But when her disorder leads to repeated fainting spells and visits to her doctor, Margaret is shipped off to the Briarwood Residential Treatment Center, where she encounters the magnetic and rebellious Carrie, a roommate and romantic interest; kindhearted doctors; and even a suffragist ghost--all of whom prompt Margaret's reckoning with her own body, gender identity, and desires. Weaving together flashbacks, pop culture references (GCSA originated as the Shady Bluff Baby-Sitters Club), and accounts of old GCSA cases, Milks's dynamic, fast-paced novel beams with wonderful insight, even as its various timelines and registers do not always meld into a consonant whole. The book's exploration of eating disorders, mental illnesses, and healing is superbly nuanced, as Milks carefully dives into the clinic's various characters' histories. Throughout, this is emotionally complex and illuminating. Agent: Rachel Crawford, MacKenzie Wolf Literary Agency (Sept.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
