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.
