The Most Beautiful Girl in the World is the deeply affecting story of Robin Simonsen, a girl growing up in the 1960s and 70s on the wrong side of a Chicago suburb. After the death of her young mother, Robin is left with her kind but irresponsible father - a junkman turned drug dealer - and her grandmother, a retired Vegas showgirl, both of whom draw local fixers and ex-cons into the Simonsen's increasingly shady home. Bright, wise, and observant, Robin is the quiet outsider to her hedonistic family, struggling to come to terms with her ardent love for girls. Trapped in a house scarily alive with a rogue's gallery of hapless and often hilarious crooks, misfits, and hangers-on, Robin must look elsewhere for stability, befriending the son of the suburb's only African-American family - a boy whose unimpeachable manners and flawless grades mask his own sexuality - and falling in love with the high school beauty. Wry, edgy, and smart, ""The Most Beautiful Girl in the World"" offers a new kind of young heroine, one who stands fearlessly at the precipice of a family and a town's self-destruction, defiantly fighting to save herself.