A nameless young woman starts her freshman year of college with one goal
in mind: survival. Newly transplanted to the big city of Chicago, she is
one of the rare few to leave her small working class town in Iowa, let
alone for a prestigious university. She is not driven by academic
ambition, nor is she a social butterfly. Her true gift is an ability to
understand the needs of others, and to reflect back the version of
themselves they wish to see, rendering herself invisible. Deftly, she
conceals her deeply troubled past--especially from her charismatic
yuppie-in-the-making best friend and roommate. For a while, she
assimilates, living a new life not in any way her own. But the mask she
wears cannot hide her secrets forever, and at some point she will be
truly seen, possibly for the first time in her life. Set in the early
80s, against the backdrop of a city terrorized by the Tylenol Killer, a
local psychopath rumored to be stuffing cyanide into drugstore meds,
Silver Girl is a deftly psychological account of the nuances of
sisterhood. Contrasting obsession and longing, need versus desire,
Leslie Pietrzyk delves into the ways class and trauma are often enmeshed
to dictate one's sense of self, and how a single relationship can
sometimes lead to redemption.
