Review by Booklist Review
In this character study, an unnamed narrator tries to bury her past by reinventing herself at a university just outside of Chicago. Arriving solo via Greyhound bus, with a cardboard suitcase, our main character is immediately befriended by Jess, her dorm-room neighbor. Jess is everything she is not confident, privileged, and rich. From her abusive past, our narrator has learned to be either what others wanted her to be or simply invisible, and with Jess, she can be something else entirely. But as Jess' picture-perfect family begins to crumble, it becomes more difficult for the narrator to keep her own past buried and continue a life built on deceit. Pietrzyk's writing is dense and intense as readers spend the book in her main character's head, but her story is realistic and never sensational, even with the ripped-from-the-headlines 1982 Tylenol murders providing a backdrop and also personally affecting the girls. Readers who wished that Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep (2005) was darker should try Silver Girl.--Sexton, Kathy Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The latest from Pietrzyk (Pears on a Willow Tree) is a profound, mesmerizing, and disturbing novel that delves into the vagaries of college relationships and how the social-financial stratum one is born into reverberates through one's life. The unnamed narrator-hailing from a poor family headed by an abusive father in Iowa-is befriended by her roommate, Jess, a charismatic Chicago socialite, during their freshman year at an unnamed university in Evanston, Ill. She wants to hide her past and reinvent herself. Meanwhile, Jess's father sends his mistress's daughter to live with the two girls after she accidentally poisons her mother. This strains the alliance between the two young women, already tenuous because of underlying jealousies and competitiveness. The narrator makes the same mistakes over and over again in her personal life, and the author posits that there is a way out, but at a cost. In addition to capturing college life on a Midwest campus, Pietrzyk brilliantly depicts the push-and-pull dynamics between the two women, resulting in a memorable character study. Agent: Kerry D'Agostino, Curtis Brown. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A girl from a background of poverty and abuse becomes best friends at college with a wealthy classmate, from whom she hides everything about her life.Pietrzyk's (The Angel on My Chest, 2015, etc.) fourth work of fiction is set in the early 1980s in Chicago, a city then terrorized by the Tylenol Killer, who put cyanide in random capsules and returned them to drugstore shelves, killing seven people. We meet the unnamed narrator moving into her dorm freshman year: just looking at her roommate's stuff fills her with bitterness. She has few possessions, no money, and no supportive family, having come alone on an overnight bus from Iowa with a cardboard suitcase. Then a girl comes in to borrow masking tape: Jess. "Where'd you come from, anyways?" she asks. The narrator replies that she's the devil's daughter and she comes from hell. It's a joke, but it's as much of the truth as she'll ever tell (though the reader will hear it all). Jess is instantly enchanted. "I love you already," she says, and the narrator marvels at how she said it "easily and simply, like tossing a beanbag to a child." Creating an alternate self who is not penniless and damaged, she makes herself indispensable to Jess and soon is being invited to dinners and shopping with her parents, to their home. But the size of the hole inside this girl is incalculable; she needs much more than she is given, and sometimes Jess is stingy. When Jess' sister dies in a car accident, when the Tylenol Killer strikes someone connected to their lives, the narrator becomes ever more entangled in Jess' family. They rely on her. They think she is a simple, well-mannered girl, quiet and helpful. But the reader has seen into her past, knows her uncle, her little sister, her father, and all that happened back in Iowa. She is anything but.A dark, intense novel on a hot subject: female friendship complicated by class and privilege. Very good. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
