first review of the missing girl!

I don't have the chapbook in my hands yet, but it should be very soon, and the first review just came out this morning—by Sarah Batcheller in the wonderful PHOEBE: A JOURNAL OF ART AND LITERATURE (where my story "Winter Afternoon" was first runner-up in their 2016 Fiction Contest, judged by Joshua Ferris).

Here's a link to the review of THE MISSING GIRL at PHOEBE.

I'd love to quote all of it here, but I'll content myself with two excerpts:

"When it comes to narratives on missing and abducted women, we normally explore these titillating, abhorrent, and violent story arcs, for good and understandable reasons. But, when I first read Doyle's book, I got a deeper sense of abhorrence and haunting in the sheer simplicity, the willful unfolding, and the total likelihood of these stories."

“Terror slips into the banal glimpses of everyday life—it creeps into the spaces not yet thought to be filled. … Flash form commands the ‘white space’ in this lyrical chapbook.”

Sarah Batcheller tweeted the review with the comment: "This book CHANGED me."

I have to say I'm very nervous about reviews. I hear Virginia Woolf was plunged into deep depression by reviews (though she wrote many herself, not always positive), and I can see why.

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