I’m really getting a kick out of this year’s debut authors. They are producing entirely readable works that mash up genres and interrogate some of the most critical issues of our time right now as they bleed and sparkle at their very centers. Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash is just one of these slow simmering eruptive literary volcanoes that sends families, small communities, a local church, a shipping magnate and a longevity cult into a tornado of a tale. In this issue of Bookisshh we’ll explore a fantastic, award-nominated debut work of literary fiction and obsess over the question: Can a family really be this messy? Put on your hazmat suit and let’s find out shall we?

Lost Lambs, by Madeline Cash, 2026, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, Fiction is the debut novel for Cash who at 30 years of age straddles the Millennial and GenZ cusp. Maybe that’s why I liked this little book of hers—I too am a tweener between eras and also have a long telescope looking into politics, pop culture and sociocultural change. Cash does a fine job crashing the lives separated by late stage capitalism in Lost Lambs. She spies into their church communities, secret shipyards and guarded estates and opens up the hearts and souls between family and community members as they navigate the challenges imposed by institutional impacts. It’s all very real how Cash’s vignettes show readers how very broken societies can be in small town coastal spaces and suburbs. It is startling how similar the cause/effect scenarios can be in geographically dissimilar locations, and occupants who’ve invested in the location-based lifestyle choices who live behind closed doors don’t realize that they haven’t beat the system. Instead the system beats them…

Who is Madeline Cash then? During her early evolution she was part of the “Sad Girl” literary scene and is a major figure in the indie internet era and Weird Girl literature scene that targets and resonates with GenZ readers. Cash’s fiction is widely recognized for capturing the digital landscape anxieties, and Y2K internet aesthetic central to early GenZ girlhood. She uses GenZ-coded stick-and-pokes over Millennial narrative style choices. Today at 30 years old Madeline Cash holds a Bachelor of Arts from Sarah Lawrence College. In 2020 Cash Co-founded Forever Magazine during the COVID-19 pandemic. Later, in 2023, she authored Earth Angel, a short story collection which won the PenCraft Fiction Award. Her stories have appeared in The Baffler, The Drift, and Nylon magazines. Today Cash continues to write fiction, and as co-founder, author and copywriter continues on with the independent publication Forever Magazine. No amount of publication consolidation can keep Madeline Cash and her posse from taking to page, shaping a cultural lens and cranking out issues.

Lost Lambs centers around 1 family, 1church and 1 shipping magnate and the auxiliary characters really bring texture and flavor to this tale of a messy family. Picture a small town somewhere on the West coast where ships dock, cargo is catalogued, unloaded and stored, and ships leave. An entire town has formed and expanded due to this shipping company. This where the Flynn family lives and struggles maintaining a sense of hearth and home. Bud/William (depending on his context) is the stale loaf breadwinner who does accounting for the local shipping company. He sleeps in the family van housed in the garage while his wife dominates their bedroom. She is a former and failed artist who passes her days taking lengthy baths, smokes pot and obsesses over her skin rather than feeding her children and participating in their lives. She is Catherine and she is into polyamory (open Marriage) and interior design projects that she neither stars nor finishes. Bud and Catherine have 3 daughters: Abigail 17, Louise 15, and Harper 12. These girls demonstrate how absolutely lonely and empty their family life is and how challenging life is without a parental unit and or emotionally present mother. The 3 Flynn daughters each perform a unique brand of tragicomedy and conflict. Parenting is all up to Bud especially as he departs from his musician name Bud and grows up into William as he defends his daughter’s lives and finds true love. Cash interrogates love in Lost Lambs and shows readers how love changes as we do AND that sometimes love isn’t enough to build a life upon especially when people become toxic with one another and in Lost Lambs toxicity becomes tragicomedy and effective contemplative fodder for readers witnessing a messy family…

Lost Lambs opens with Harper Flynn,12, who is in the office of Father Andrew, the local Catholic school priest who is hosting the Inner Beauty Pageant. Harper is intellectually very gifted and is also very naughty or norm-challenging. She is a core protagonist and uniquely positioned as youngest child, family detective and is entirely unfiltered. After snooping in her father’s emails from work Harper detects that criminal activity is taking place and she conducts her own investigation that sends people in a tailspin. Harper’s consequences for snooping include a Christian conversion camp and Bud’s lack of family oversight lands him in The Lost Lambs church therapy group. The frank conversations between Harper and Bud in their therapeutic settings are heartfelt and insightful as both parent and child come of age.

Flynn daughter, Louise, 15, struggles with a speech challenge—she stammers, and feels invisible sandwiched between her 2 powerful dynamic sisters. Louise is chronically online and spends all of her time in a treehouse alone with a computer while she messages with a terrorist who is trying to radicalize Louise into extremism. It’s working and Louise who knows little of love and struggles with identity plans to marry this internet lover, and blow up her community and become a martyr. Louise thinks she’s found a man who loves her and a life they can share but what she ends up with is house arrest, a record, and an ankle bracelet.

The great beauty of the Flynn family is Abigail, 17, and is the oldest daughter. Abigail is a teenager who has outgrown her small town so she experiments with drugs, and older men as escape routes. All of this leads Abigail into the home of a bad billionaire who is obsessed with longevity and Parabiosis— which is when two living animals are surgically joined so they share a blood supply—and is also Bud’s boss and owner of the shipping company. While parabiosis seems unrelated to a story about a small town messy family in a church community it connects directly to a plot that serves as commentary on the dark precepts of being a billionaire their motives and impacts on those of lesser economic means—predator and prey so-to-speak… In other words, this particular billionaire, Mr. Alabaster, is the founder of a longevity cult that feeds off the blood of young women trafficked in from Albania.

Cash interrogates everything in her quirky romp; open marriage, polyamory, crises of faith, radicalization, over sexualization, longevity obsession, billionaires, ancestral inheritances, human trafficking, cults, identity, absent mothers, and repressed creativity. Critics and reviewers compare Madeline Cash to Jonathan Franzen because no one owns the truth in a messy family and everyone’s truth is raw and hangs on the laundry line in the bright sun for all to see and ponder over. In terms of structure and style Cash engages in unique wordplay particularly in the consonant blend of letters, “GN”. Opening examples of intentional “GN” emphasis are densely positioned beginning with the word gnat and future “GNs”are intentionally inserted in words like: extermignate and dognate for exterminate and donate. Cash employs this technique throughout the narrative and it’s as if gnats are constantly flying around unconsciously in the text. Gross and funny. Quirky… The external third-person narration and snappy, snarky dialogue keep the plot paced and forward moving. Furthermore, Cash’s secondary and supportive characters are entirely colorful and/or strange in some instances, but they help the Flynn family members achieve breakthroughs themselves and achieve self-actualization. Pleasant surprises abound in this community of characters from beginning til end. In the end no one owns the way to live life, people are messy and make messy families, but family should remain a place for acceptance, support, forgiveness and love.

All of the author’s cartoon-like character portraits come to life, they make you smile, wonder and concern yourself as they march under and over ground in armies of family (broken and all), church community (untraditional and all) marching toward a a billionaire’ s cult ritual on a heavily surveilled private estate.The Flynn’s individual and collective catharses are the last beat of the story when a spotlight shines on just how important and precious weathering a crisis and remaining a family really is… Realistic? Unsure. Necessary? Surely it is…