THREE LOST GIRLS

McElrath’s whimsically imaginative novel brings together three famous female protagonists from late-19th- and early-20th-century popular fiction and challenges the line between reality and fantasy.

The story opens in the spring of 1904, in a small, hardscrabble Kansas farmhouse, as 8-year-old Dorothy Gale (familiar to readers from L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels) is regaining consciousness after suffering a blow to her head—an injury that occurred after a tornado ripped through the area. She finds herself surrounded by her Aunt Em, Uncle Henry, and three farmhands—known as Hawk, Chicory, and Zach—who are as close to her as family. On her feet she wears a pair of maroon-colored slippers. She tells her aunt about a place beyond the rainbow that she’s just visited, but this revelation is met with confusion and fear. Doc Sorensen, a local physician, declares that she has hallucinated her visit to Oz; she is, perhaps, suffering from “prairie fever,” he surmises. But this diagnosis doesn’t take at least one mystery into account: Where did she acquire those strange slippers? Later that year, across the Atlantic Ocean, three missing children—John, Michael, and Wendy Darling of Peter Panfame—have returned to their London home after a two-week disappearance; they report an extraordinary adventure in a strange place called Neverland. In 1905, both Dorothy and Wendy begin a year in the care of Dr. Alice Liddell-Dodgson, a British psychiatrist who is uniquely equipped to treat young delusional patients: As a child, she mistakenly ate a psychedelic mushroom, after which she found herself in a place called Wonderland.

Over the course of this novel, McElrath presents readers with a lively narrative that draws on elements of familiar classic tales while also featuring an ample supply of humorous dialogue, with Wendy speaking in the voice of a well-educated member of London’s upper-middle class (“Dorothy Gale is a complete peasant!” she writes at one point), and Dorothy (who initially calls Wendy a “prissypants”) speaking in the rough dialect of the Kansas plains. Overall, the narrative reveals itself as a tale of friendship and love set against a backdrop of scientific research that’s frequently belied by unexplained, apparently magical occurrences. Indeed, as the story goes on and readers watch Dorothy and Wendy grow to young adulthood, it becomes apparent that there is more to their supposed delusions than meets the scientific eye. McElrath draws upon Native American snake-based legends and Scottish mysticism (“tales of Tir-Nan-Og and thesidheand boucca spirits”), which, in the story, is consciously and unconsciously passed down through the generations. The cannabis-smoking Alice plays a relatively small albeit pivotal role in the novel compared to the other two literary figures, but she effectively helps the girls to distinguish fantasy from reality during her interactions with them. Added to the mix are adult discussions of sexual orientation (“A love that dares not speak its name?” “A love...that hasn’t any name”) as well as nods to feminism.

An entertaining coming-of-age tale with a final amusing twist.