cover image Smile for the Camera

Smile for the Camera

Kelle James, Simon & Schuster, $16.99 (416p) ISBN 978-1-4424-0623-0

Kelle has an abusive father, but she also has an escape: she's beautiful, and at age 16 she moves from Maryland to New York City to become a model. Yet 1970s Manhattan is anything but glamorous, and debut author James's memoir is less about life as an aspiring model than it is about the many ways that men try to take advantage of pretty teenage girls. James's New York is a seedy place filled with roach-infested apartments, nights at Studio 54, drugs, girls being duped into sex, and the struggle to survive on very little money ("Don't never walk on Forty-second Street neither," a bagel shop employee tells her soon after she arrives in town. "They'll make a meal out of ya there"). Her present-tense prose, while technically adept, can feel precious and overwritten, and Kelle's naïveté forced (sure, New York accents are thick, but it's tough to believe she wouldn't pick up what "loitah" and "trooncy" mean). Still, with painful accounts of rape, abuse, and her connection to a 1978 murder, it's very easy to forget that this isn't fiction. Ages 14–up. (Nov.)