THE WORDS WE'VE LOST AND FOUND

Doll’s novel focuses on a woman dealing with grief and love.

As the book opens, a young woman named Alice O’Brien, in the nervous run-up to her marriage to her fiancé, Oliver Marvette, enters a bridal contest to win a free wedding dress. Her essay will be a tragic one: It will feature not only a biographical sketch of her father, Danny, but also reflections on his tragic death in a plane crash eight years ago. Alice’s dad had long been her hero, the main person who championed her during childhood, when she was diagnosed with selective mutism because she wasn’t able to speak. They developed a private language of signals and gestures. Alice began a private message correspondence with him called “Ask Dad,” which allows Doll to add long stretches of Danny’s own words to the story as he dispenses wisdom about his daughter’s various life dilemmas. Into the melancholy chaos of Alice preparing for her wedding and writing her essay comes a new, totally unexpected element: Her father’s laptop has miraculously survived the plane crash without a scratch. Now, after her mother has been secretly holding on to it for nearly a decade, Alice finally has it. Thanks to her father’s love of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, she’s certain she can unlock the laptop and read all his last thoughts and recorded experiences, which adds a further narrative thread to the novel. Through these various story threads, the author fleshes out Alice’s memories of being taken from her parents for a year because of her mutism—“I’ll never get that time back, and those people who caused this to happen, I hope they rot in hell for all eternity”—and bonding with her best friend, Drew. The plot becomes further complicated when Tonya Meyer, a survivor of the plane crash, enters the story.

At heart, Doll’s tale is about characters who are desperate to mend things that have become damaged or gone off-track. Alice’s mother describes Danny as someone who liked to fix things, even when they couldn’t be repaired. “And when he failed,” she recalls, “rather than admit the truth, I think it was just easier for him to take the blame.” This mania applies to plenty of the characters in this tale, which is skillfully complicated by the many narrative voices the author juggles throughout. A lot of these players are badly disjointed in some way, as when Tonya refers to herself as “misaligned, as if she had been living someone else’s life.” This misalignment device becomes crucial in the novel’s second half, when Doll takes his story of fond memories and bereavement and wonderfully shakes it to pieces, upending every one of the audience’s assumptions. These bombshells come in a marvelously controlled series of disclosures that are canny mirror images of the revelations in the book’s first half, retroactively turning the entire novel into a Chinese puzzle and a psychological labyrinth. Amazingly, through it all, Alice’s affection for her lost father remains heartfelt. “There you are, just as I remember you,” she says gently to his image when she first opens his laptop.

A smart, twist-filled tale of a woman coping with the loss of her father.