March 2026:
Contemporary Literature
A little about this month's book:
At a gathering of the Lost Lambs, a Christian guidance club that meets every Monday and Friday at Our Lady of Suffering Church, the facilitator, Miss Priscilla Winkle, announces, “We are going to try something new today”—a writing exercise in which each member of the group is tasked with inventing an imaginary world. One of the attendees is Bud Flynn, the patriarch of the fracturing family at the center of Madeline Cash’s exhilarating comic novel, whose title, “Lost Lambs,” is both a nod to the fictional support group and an accurate description of Cash’s wayward characters. Nearly all of them have complexes about youth: either they dwell on it as they flail through midlife crises or else they are presently ensnared by its many tortures and joys.
Cash, a first-time novelist still in her twenties, is also trying something new. The book is set in an unnamed American suburb somewhere on the West Coast which is stripped of actually existing cultural, political, or historical markers. In their place, Cash has substituted a constellation of witty concepts that fall somewhere between a creative branding exercise and a Christopher Guest-like parody of small-town dysfunction. Some schoolgirls compete in Our Lady of Suffering’s Inner Beauty Pageant, while their more rebellious counterparts are shipped off to Saint Peter’s Nature and Wilderness Retreat for a bit of mandated reformation. Local stores include “a nineteenth-century-themed British pub called Olive or Twist” and a restaurant named Lucky Penne, and many townspeople are fond of a show called “Dad University,” in which a son and his estranged father are assigned as college roommates.
Cash is adept at playing around with figures we’ve seen before: the corrupt priest, the depressed dad, the pill-popping bestie. Like the other characters in the book, Harper is a stock figure, the brainiac child, but her fearlessness in the face of a crumbling, dishonest world reinvigorates the type...
Cash’s first book, a short-story collection called “Earth Angel,” was published by the indie press CLASH Books in 2023. (She also co-founded and, until recently, edited the alt-lit journal Forever Magazine.) Most of its seventeen stories feature young female protagonists caught somewhere between attending high school and turning thirty. One dates a guy who likes to kill squirrels; another meets a creepy older man who admires the outfit she wears to school. (“You like [BAND]?” he asked me. I looked down at my shirt and said, “yeah” and he said, “fuck yeah.”) There are deadening moments when Cash doesn’t lift a finger to transform the numbed-out terrors of doomscrolling: “I’m twenty-four and everyone on Instagram has been sexually assaulted and I’m allowed to roll my skirt up as short as I want now because of #metoo and because there is no God and Trump’s railing Adderall.” But Cash’s most original and engaging writing is slightly out of step with reality and bleakly funny, devoted to wordplay and willing to be foolish about it. “The office is purgatory and I’m doing limbo in limbo,” says the narrator of the story “TGIF,” an assistant who’s terrible at her job. “How low can I go?”
Cash’s dialogue is the novel’s greatest trick. It’s blunt, even a little wooden, yet she wields it with a quicksilver touch, creating volleys of unblinking banter that read like a mashup of a twisted after-school special with the existential musings of a Hal Hartley film: sometimes brutal, sometimes winning, and—like the paddle bearing the insignia “Holy Sisters’ Paddleball Champion” that hangs on the wall of Mother Superior’s office at the girls’ school and is rumored to be used for beatings—not just for show...
This [book] is a wonderful encapsulation of childhood curiosity, the rush that comes with discovering clues to existence everywhere around you, invisible sources in the air. It could also be a description of writing fiction, at least the sort on display in “Lost Lambs,” in which stock characters are seen askew and reënchanted. With her energetic prose and restless imagination, Cash does one better than survey the world; she reinvents it.
