Gr. 8-12. Growing up as a nice Jewish girl in Johannesburg in the 1960s, 16-year-old Ruth fights with her racist stepfather and worries that her boyfriend will find her too flat chested. Ruth knows it's unfair that the white "masters" and "madams" live so lavishly while blacks are so poor, but she's not really interested in politics anyway. Also, there's nothing she can do about it ("Basically, I thought I was charitable to blacks and all that"). Silver evokes the world of white privilege with a sharp eye for the cruel and the absurd. Without in any way belittling Ruth's YA angst about family, self-image, and sex, he shows how small and smug her suburban world is. As in Sacks' Beyond Safe Boundaries (1989) and Silver's own No Tigers in Africa (1992), the teenager is shocked awake when "politics" affects someone close: Her friend's brother is imprisoned, tortured, and then forced into exile. What's more, Ruth discovers her own corruption when she gets the garden "boy" dismissed for inadvertently spying on her when she's using her breast vibrator. The vignettes of the social scene go on too long, and a plot contrivance about witch doctor medicine works neither as fact nor as metaphor. It's Ruth's narrative, self-absorbed and naive, that carries the story. In one quiet climax, she meets a young black student, Ben, and discovers that he is a person; at the end of the story, Ben is still in prison, detained without trial. Hazel Rochman

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