The novel begins with the protagonist returning to the town she grew up in for the wedding of two school friends. This is not initially an unhappy childhood: with her good friends from the neighbourhood, Sophia and Pikka, she roams about the area, making up stories about ghosts in the abandoned hut, playing imaginative games around the Silberfarm.
Amongst his many other problems, her father is a hoarder and a compulsive shopper. The narrator comments that the only time he had a desire that he acted on was when he met her mother at a local music gig and asked her out.
Her mother is Turkish, joined her sister in Germany for work, and then got together with the father. She responds to this, and to the difficulties at home, by retreating into silence in class and finding her schoolwork increasingly hard. The narrator achieves this with ease, but by this time she knows what she really wants is to go to university, for which she needs the Abitur β the equivalent of A levels in Germany.
And in doing so, she leaves her home and her family behind. This is a really moving and compelling story of a bright girl from a disadvantaged background who falls through the net and yet makes it in the end. The novel is also an indictment in my view of the selective school system and its perpetuation of class inequalities. The sense of the Gymnasium as a school for the elite comes through and permits the condescending and racist attitudes of teachers like Herr Kaiser to flourish.
Later, at the Abendschule and Obergymnasium , the narrator meets individual teachers who are interested in her and support herβoften so crucial in narratives of achieving academically against all the oddsβyet this cannot compensate for the missed experience of learning alongside her peers, of achieving milestones alongside the kids she started out with. But the ending takes us back to that wedding visit, where the narrator sees Sophia and Pikka marry, in the hometown where they will settle, just like their parents.
