Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith, a review from Washington Post Book World by Reeve Lindbergh.
"Mary-Ann Tirone Smith, the author of eight novels, has written a memoir that is at once entertaining and troubling. She alternates her own experiences as a child growing up in 1950s Hartford, Conn., with chapters on Robert Nelson Malm, who was tried and executed for the rape and murder of one of her fifth-grade classmates.
The memoir chapters are matter-of-fact, often very funny and warmly intimate. But the Malm narrative is impersonal, a stark and detailed recitation of fact. To go from one style to the other can be disconcerting, but constructing a divided narrative may have been the only way the writer could bring herself to tell this tale. " Read the entire Washington Post Book World review.