Displaced and Replaced Sisters: On Leslie Pietrzyk’s ‘Silver Girl’

If, like me, you are a reader who wants to turn and run whenever the phrase “coming-of-age novel” appears in conversation or in a blurb, it may seem that a book about two young women attending college in the early 1980s is not for you. But if you seek to understand how American consumerism became what it is today, or if you’ve ever felt like a skinful of secrets, I’ve got just the book for you, from a small press that reliably delivers exceptional novels about women and the worlds they inhabit.

is not really a coming-of-age novel, anyway. It’s not such a simple or insignificant book that it can be shunted into the pigeonhole of a particular genre and set aside to go quietly out of print. is an act of mesmerism, of misdirection; it appears slight and forgettable, but turns