Rockstars Book Tour & Giveaway: The Silver Girl by Leslie Pietrzyk
Hey guys! Happy Wednesday! So I'm excited to be a part of this tour showcasing Silver Girl by Leslie Pietrzyk. Keep reading to see my thoughts, information about the book and author, and participate in a giveaway! Check out the other blogs that are a part of this tour as well:
Tour Schedule:
Week One:
2/26/2018- BookHounds YA- Interview
2/28/2018- BookishRealmReviews- Review
Week Two:
Series: N/A# of Pages: 272
Publication: February 27, 2018
Source: E-book from publisher
Genre: Realistic Fiction
Amazon | B&N | TBD | iBooks | Goodreads
It's the early 1980s. Ronald Reagan's economy will trickle down any day now, and Chicago's Tylenol Killer has struck: an unknown person is stuffing cyanide into capsules, then returning them to drugstore shelves.
Against the backdrop of this rampant anxiety, one young woman, desperate to escape the unspoken secrets of her Midwestern family, bluffs her way into the fancy "school by the lake" in Chicago. There she meets Jess, charismatic and rich and needy, and the two form an insular, competitive friendship. Jess' family appears perfect to the narrator's wishful eye, and she longs to fit into their world, even viewing herself as a potentially better daughter than the unappreciative Jess. But the uneven power dynamic chafes the narrator, along with lingering guilt about the sister she left behind. Her behavior becomes increasingly risky - and after Jess' sister dies in murky circumstances and the Tylenol killer exposes the intricate double life of Jess' father, she finds herself scrambling for footing. Nothing is as it seems, and the randomness of life feels cruel, whether one's fate is swallowing a poisoned Tylenol or being born into a damaged and damaging family.
SILVER GIRL is a cousin to Emma Cline's The Girls and Emily Gould's Friendship in its nuanced exploration of female friendship, with the longing of Stephanie Danler's Sweetbitter.
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Wow...it blows my mind to even begin to think about the dynamic of this book. I saw someone describe this book as a cross between Emma Cline's The Girls and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and I couldn't agree more. This book follows a complex, but thoroughly interesting stream of consciousness of a young lady who is not only attempting to find her own identity but also where she fits in terms of her best friend.
While I thought the writing was going to be hard to follow, I found that if flowed naturally and was quite enjoyable. There are some elements of this novel that I found so interesting including the fact that the narrator remains unnamed and appears to be unreliable and the fact the book was not told in chronological order. Typically these are elements that turn me away from books but for this book it made sense and it actually worked within the entire framework of the novel.
I won't say much about this book for the simple fact that it felt as though each line is extremely important to the story, but that it is a close examination of female friendships, sisterhood, betrayal, lies, forgiveness, pain and more. While I didn't enjoy the relationship between the narrator and her best friend Jess, I think that the dynamics of their relationship played an integral part into the entire story as a whole. While I understand that everyone isn't a fan of stream of consciousness, this book handles it in a way that's cool and interesting. I wish I could say more about this book but it feels as though everything in this book is too important to discuss. If you are interested in The Girls or The Bell Jar then I would definitely recommend giving this one a shot.
Leslie
Pietrzyk is the author of two novels, Pears on a Willow Tree and A Year and a
Day. This Angel on My Chest, her collection of linked short stories, won the
2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published by the University of
Pittsburgh Press in October 2015. Kirkus Reviews named it one of the 16 best
story collections of the year. A new novel, Silver Girl, is forthcoming from
Unnamed Press in February 2018. Her short fiction and essays have appeared/are
forthcoming in many publications, including Hudson Review, Southern Review,
Arts & Letters, Gettysburg Review, The Sun, Shenandoah, River Styx, Iowa
Review, TriQuarterly, New England Review, Salon, Washingtonian, and the
Washington Post Magazine. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf
Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Pietrzyk is a member
of the core fiction faculty at the Converse low-residency MFA program and often
teaches in the MA Program in Writing at Johns Hopkins University. Raised in
Iowa, she now lives in Alexandria, Virginia.
Giveaway Details: International
3 winners
will receive a finished copy of SILVER GIRL, US Only.
Ends on March
20th at Midnight EST!
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