In Good-bye Glamour Girl, Tamar again explores a young woman's need to recover a usable past while paradoxically distancing herself from that past, a heritage of horror, the horror of the Holocaust. As with Bluesfor Silk Garcia, Good-bye Glamour Girl is loosely autobiographical; it begins with the heroine's arrival in New York and includes her "Americanization" via the movies.

Journey by Patricia MacLachlan and Suzanne Newton's M. V. Sexton Speaking are two young adult novels thematically similar to Blues for Silk Garcia. All address the premature death of a female protagonist's parent(s), and this protagonist's struggle to come to terms with that loss.

Though perhaps written for a slightly more mature audience, Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter is a moving testament to the real, raw world of professional improvisational jazz. While Blues for Silk Garcia exposes the seamy underside of one fictitious musician's life, Ondaatje's...