Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body

by Megan Milks

A queer coming-of-age novel about the twists and turns of gender, identity, and mystery.

Meet Margaret. At age twelve, she was the head detective of the mystery club Girls Can Solve Anything. Margaret and her three best friends led exciting lives solving crimes, having adventures, and laughing a lot. But now that she’s entered high school, the club has disbanded, and Margaret is unmoored—she doesn’t want to grow up, and she wishes her friends wouldn’t either. Instead, she opts out, developing an eating disorder that quickly takes over her life. When she lands in a treatment center, Margaret finds her path to recovery twisting sideways as she pursues a string of new mysteries involving a ghost, a hidden passage, disturbing desires, and her own vexed relationship with herself.

Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body reimagines nineties adolescence—mashing up girl group series, choose-your-own-adventures, and chronicles of anorexia—in a queer and trans coming-of-age tale like no other. An interrogation of girlhood and nostalgia, dysmorphia and dysphoria, this debut novel puzzles through the weird, ever-evasive questions of growing up.

Paperback | 256 pages | Amethyst Editions | 2021

Megan Milks is the author of the novels Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body and Slug and Other Stories, both out in Fall 2021 from Feminist Press. Their personal history of the early internet, Tori Amos Bootleg Webring, is now out from Instar Books as part of the Remember the Internet series. With Marisa Crawford, they co-edited We Are The Baby-Sitters Club: Essays and Artwirj frin Grown Up Readers (Chicago Review Press, 2021); with KJ Cerankowski, they co-edited Asexualites: Feminist and Queer Perspectives (Routledge, 2014). Born in Virginia, they currently live in Brooklyn.