Leslie Pietrzyk

A bold novel. This novel is about a girl (never named) from a working class family in Iowa City and her years at a big Chicago university filled with the connected and the well-to-do, and how she navigates this uneasy journey in the early 1980s with the Tylenol scare in the background, with drinking and sex, and most interesting to me, class divides been the very wealthy and the just getting by. I loved this unnamed narrator at the center of SILVER GIRL. I loved how the story moves from show more Chicago to Iowa City, to her immediate turbulent passed of out-of-work guitar-playing uncles/predators to brutal fathers and Virginia Slims-smoking mother and her angelic sister, Grace (maybe my only criticism—Grace is too good and named Grace)—and then moves back to campus—to her simmering friendship with her wealthy roommate Jess, to her knowing obsession with Jess’s fiancé. Some chapters are very short, flash fiction almost, and others feel like short stories unto themselves. This is a novel that writer should read closely for the language deftly turns from beautiful to beautifully brutal. This is also a novel about female friendships, and even more so, about love between sisters. I would wholly recommend this novel to book clubs because it seems like we’ve all been there—unsure and sure of ourselves at the same time, ‘silver girls.’ While the first person narrator is never named, I feel I know her. I have been her. Read. show less

This book is brilliant. Full stop.

Most of these characters I have very little in common with, and yet. And yet, at every turn you understand their humanity--their quirks and foibles. I think the greatest power, and the greatest gift, that a novel can provide, is allowing me to walk in someone else's shoes, to better understood them.

And this book has that in spades. Despite their, in some cases debilitating flaws, the characters in these stories grant us empathy and understanding.

In show more addition to all of these, the stories, through details and language and turns of phrase, transport us.

Highly recommended! show less

Four generations of women, beginning with Rose, a Polish immigrant, and ending with her great-granddaughter, Amy, explore how to relate to one another and to their common ancestry; how to hold on to the past, and how to let it go. We know there are men in these women's lives, but as in the second generation's orderly American homes, they are always in another room somewhere. This isn't their story. The viewpoint changes from one woman to another as the novel proceeds; most of the time this show more works very well, but occasionally, especially at the beginning, it was difficult to remember which voice I was listening to. One section where Amy, on holiday from her job teaching English in Bangkok, struck out alone on a sightseeing jaunt seemed glaringly out of synch with the rest of the novel, although it could easily stand alone as a very effective short story. show less

The story of the close knit Marchewska women beginning with Rose emigrating from Poland to Detroit in 1919 and bearing 4 daughters. Her mother dies soon after her departure, and in her grief she creates and enforces an environment of dependence and loyalty to family that holds firm for years. The families grow larger; living in the same neighborhood, seeing each other every day, shopping together. And the women spend hours in their kitchens preparing, cooking, canning and baking all year show more long.

It is Helen's daughter, Ginger, who breaks the mold and escapes what she feels is an overbearing, stifling and racist family environment in which everyone is expected to think the same way, do the same, day in and out. She moves to Phoenix and remains there returning only to visit every summer with her children. But her feelings of guilt for abandoning her mother and family is a high price to pay for freedom.

A good read about a strong family dynamic with women who are there for each other but who cannot understand or accept change. show less