Cee-Cee Bianco is visited by the Virgin Mary, but her brothers see a much darker vision. When the youngest, Baby Pauly, falls into a coma after witnessing a brutal crime in the woods, and area girls go missing at an increasing frequency, Cee-Cee is guarded by a faction of Vietnam-war-protesting Sisters whose order is not the benign sanctuary it seems.

"In upstate New York, young girls go missing, nuns are revolting, Nixon is resigning, and young Cee-Cee Bianco has visions of the Virgin Mary in this polished debut novel...Caschetta’s first novel is filled with a kind of dark poetry and the menace of ordinary evils." —Kirkus Reviews

“This debut sparkles; Miracle Girls is that rarest thing: a literary miracle. MB Caschetta will break your heart and mend it all at once.”
—Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng and Half a Life

“It’s not every day the Virgin Mary makes an appearance in a novel. And how fitting that MB Caschetta invites her into a story where a grandmother provides safety and thousands of prayers; where law-breaking nuns save desperate girls; where life hurts and is full of grace; a world where miracles happen. MB doesn’t flinch from writing painful truths nor does she flinch from lifting her characters up and us along with them. Miracle Girls is a wonderful book I will give to friends.”
—Beverly Donofrio, author of Riding in Cars With Boys, Looking for Mary, and Astonished

“What MB Caschetta’s novel brilliantly proposes is an underground railroad for girls. It feels like one of those girls grew up and wrote Miracle Girls. I loved reading it and rooting for CeeCee as she struggles to survive her own family and her saintly little girl voyage with the aid of intergenerational healing, and the vintage magic of radical nuns and priests from a time when they worked for peace and helped the lost girls of the world find home.”
—Eileen Myles, author of Snowflake

“A wondrous and exhilarating novel. The Bianco family is unforgettable in all its  catastrophic dysfunction but also in the capacity of some of its most broken members to fight their way toward salvation. Miracle Girls is an unflinching, fantastical and unexpectedly healing act of the imagination.  You won't have read anything quite like it, and you're not likely soon to forget it either.”
—Paul Russell, author of Immaculate Blue  and The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov

“Has ten year old Cee Cee Bianco just worked a miracle? Are her visions divine or or only the half-baked imaginings of a silly girl?  Cee-Cee’s mother has abandoned the family; her brother lies in a coma.  Alone, she must pick her way through a wasteland of adult foolishness, but the intuitive wisdom that guides her seems an earthly miracle. Caschetta’s vivid, thoughtful novel leaps, skips and soars along the boundary between faith and superstition, turning every expectation on its head.”
—Heidi Jon Schmidt, author of The Harbormaster’s Daughter

“Miracle Girls is a wondrous book in which gritty reality alternates with ecstatic visions, cruelty is leavened by grace, and the treachery of families and is redeemed by the kindness of strangers. MB Cashetta conjures an era, a place and her characters unforgettably. An accomplished and exceptional debut novel.”
—Ralph Sassone, author of The Intimates