A Debut Novel About the Quest for Eternal Youth

"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. By the time the meeting rolls around, nearly halfway into the novel, Miss Winkle is having an affair with Bud, who's been sleeping for the past month in a minivan."

A Christian guidance club called Lost Lambs meets twice weekly at Our Lady of Suffering Church, where Miss Priscilla Winkle leads a creative exercise asking members to invent imaginary worlds. Bud Flynn attends while sleeping in a minivan and becomes involved with Miss Winkle. His insecure wife, Catherine, begins a fling with a difficult neighbor. Their three daughters, ages twelve, fifteen, and seventeen, behave increasingly unruly. The unnamed West Coast suburb lacks specific cultural markers and functions as a satirical portrait of small-town dysfunction. Central themes include fraying adult responsibility, midlife crisis, and youth disillusionment.

Read at The New Yorker