i am the beautiful stranger Author:Rosalyn Drexler Selma Silver is thirteen when her diary begins; she is gifted, sensual and at constant war with her parents who tell her she is 'cuckoo'. But we know better: in the pages of her intimate journal we read of her days at Camp Bronx House, her letters to Charley Rogen (he is only fifteen, but his is imprisoned in Otisville for stealing cars), her ... more »quick moves from games of spin-the-bottle to sex games of another sort.
Far beyond the mere events of her life we know how Selma feels. We chare her tortures over he developing body, her urgent reaching out to her friends, her ugly exploitation by men to whom she is not Selma, the gifted singer, writer, and pianist, but Selma, the precocious sex-child.
Three years of her growing up in the thirties are revealed in the pages of her diary, sometimes pathetically, often uproariously, but always believably and with the intensity of a rarely endowed teen-aged girl.« less