Good Girl

Starred review from October 14, 2024
Aber, who won the Whiting Award for her poetry collection, Hard Damage, makes her fiction debut with a stunning coming-of-age story set amid Berlin’s underground art and music scene. Nila, the daughter of Afghan refugees, was born shortly after Germany’s reunification in the city’s “ghetto-heart.” A self-described “small rat,” she grows into a wild child, ashamed of her parents’ poor grasp of the language and of her impoverished immigrant neighborhood, where cobwebs and swastika graffiti adorn the elevators of her building. She invents fictional identities at her all-girls Catholic boarding school, alternately claiming to be Greek, Colombian, or Israeli, and discovers a love for Kafka and photography. At 19, she keeps up her “pathological habit” of lying about her identity with a goup of dance club kids, with whom she takes acid, amphetamines, and ecstasy. She also develops a toxic relationship with Marlowe Woods, 36, a fixture on the techno music scene whose bright early career as a novelist has stalled. Aber casts Nila’s struggle to find herself against a turbulent backdrop of racial tensions, including the murder of Afghan brothers in their bakery, attacks on women in hijabs, and Germans’ xenophobic fear of people with a “southern look.” In the process, Aber offers readers both a piercing look into Nila’s psyche and an acute sense of place. It’s a remarkable achievement. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency.

November 1, 2024
An aspiring photographer bent on concealing her Afghan heritage becomes embroiled in the Berlin techno scene and a fraught relationship with an older man. Nilab Haddadi, known by most of her friends as Nila, is the daughter of refugees. Her parents, who once lived prosperous lives as doctors in Kabul, fled Afghanistan before she was born. All Nilab knows is the life they subsequently carved out in Berlin, and it, by turn, embarrasses and infuriates her: Their building is run-down and littered with Nazi graffiti, neighbors eye her comings and goings suspiciously, and memories of how carefully her family had to present themselves after 9/11 to avoid being harassed still loom large. After returning home from a boarding school where no one knew her true origins, 18-year-old Nilab has no desire to stick around an apartment defined by her dead mother's absence and her father's disapproval. She escapes to a techno club she affectionately refers to as the Bunker, where she quickly falls into the orbit of 36-year-old Marlowe Woods, known throughout the underground scene as "the American writer who always carried speed." Though he has a "kind-of girlfriend" when they meet and Nilab's friends warn her against getting in too deep, there is a queasy inevitability to their union. Coming-of-age stories focused on a relationship with an older, ill-advised paramour are a time-honored tradition, but Marlowe's red flags are so glaring from the outset that Nilab comes across as startlingly, almost doggedly na�ve. Aber's storytelling also often undercuts its own tensions: Nilab narrates the novel from an indeterminate future, dampening the emotional immediacy, and more than once Aber elides dramatic conversations between characters in favor of describing the emotional aftermath. Still, Aber's vivid depiction of Berlin and the novel's earnest wrestling with shame about desire and identity will be of interest to many readers. A debut still in the process of finding itself--like its young protagonist.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

November 1, 2024
Poet Aber's lush literary debut novel highlights the experiences of almost-19-year Nilab Haddadi, living in Berlin on the cusp of 9/11. Her parents were doctors in Afghanistan before becoming asylum seekers in Germany and quickly conceiving Nilab to stall their deportation proceedings. Now Nilab is conflicted about walking the line between her Muslim heritage and her artistic and sexual desires. She feels stifled by her Afghan lineage and pretends to be Italian, Israeli, or Greek, taking the name of Nila, and yearning for thrills, pleasures, and fun. Aber, born and raised in Germany before coming to the U.S., captures the angst, pretense, and idealism of youth exacerbated by xenophobia, cultural dissonance, and fraught family dynamics in vivid scenarios depicting Berlin's bohemian nightlife. The story feels overstuffed with reflections on decorum, Islamic culture, and living authentically, and a hate-crime incident is treated like a minor speed bump. Yet readers will live viscerally through the vivid histrionics and adventures of obstinate and libidinous Nila as she tries to achieve her version of freedom and be the opposite of a "good girl."

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.