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 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. ( )