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The BookBrowse Review
The BookBrowse Review
Published February 12, 2025
ISSN: 1930-0018
The BookBrowse Review
Published February 12, 2025
ISSN: 1930-0018
Contents
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Literary Fiction
Historical Fiction
Short Stories
Essays
Thrillers
Romance
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Biography/Memoir
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Science, Health and the Environment
Poetry & Novels in Verse
Thrillers
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
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An electric debut novel about the daughter of Afghan refugees and her year of nightclubs, bad romance, and self-discovery—a portrait of the artist as a young woman set in a Berlin that can't escape its history.
A girl can get in almost anywhere, even if she can't get out.
In Berlin's artistic underground, where techno and drugs fill warehouses still pockmarked from the wars of the twentieth century, nineteen-year-old Nila at last finds her tribe. Born in Germany to Afghan parents, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, drawn to philosophy, photography, and sex, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice as a young woman and artist.
Then in the haze of Berlin's legendary nightlife, Nila meets Marlowe, an American writer whose fading literary celebrity opens her eyes to a life of personal and artistic freedom. But as Nila finds herself pulled further into Marlowe's controlling orbit, ugly, barely submerged racial tensions begin to roil Germany—and Nila's family and community. After a year of running from her future, Nila stops to ask herself the most important question: Who does she want to be?
A story of love and family, raves and Kafka, staying up all night and surviving the mistakes of youth, Good Girl is the virtuosic debut novel by a celebrated young poet and, now, a major new voice in fiction.
One
The train back to Berlin took seven hours, and the towel in my suitcase was still wet from my last swim in the lake, dampening the pages of my favorite books. I took the S-Bahn and then the U-Bahn home to Lipschitzallee and walked past the discount supermarket, the old pharmacy, and the Qurbani Bakery with the orange shop cat lounging outside its door. In our building's elevator, an intimate odor assaulted my nostrils: urine mixed with ash. Hello, spider, I said, looking at the cobweb in the corner. The ceiling lamp twitched, turning alien the swastika graffiti. My key, fastened by a pink ribbon, turned in the old lock. Nobody was home. I kicked off my shoes. The cat meowed for food, its dander floating in the air. My room was merely all it had been for so many years: a suffocating box with a tiny window, pink sheets, and that Goethe quote I'd painted in golden letters above my desk. The popcorn ceiling seemed lower than before. I wiped the kitchen counters, walked into my parents' bedroom, opened their closet, and pulled out my mother's cashmere frock. Maybe I cried, maybe I didn't. What I did was lie in bed and sleep until dark, covering my face with her dress.
It's been over a decade now, but the colors of that summer day are as precise as yesterday: I was eighteen when I returned from boarding school, and my sense of melancholy was even more overwhelming than I anticipated. My cousins called me pretentious. The Arab boys who loitered outside the shisha bar sneered at me. You changed, they said, meaning my relative lack of vernacular and my newfound obsession with eyeliner. Back then, I still wanted to be a photographer, a small Olympus point-and-shoot knocking around in my backpack. In my first days back, Berlin bloomed at the seams with rotten garbage. Ants crawled out of the sockets in my father's living room, a small street of them always leading up the wall and out the window; no matter how much poison we sprayed into the electrical outlets or taped them shut—-they just returned. And though prophesied to soon be extinct, the bees were also everywhere. They covered the overflowing trash cans in the city, or you'd see them lazily dozing on outdoor café tables, where they fattened themselves on crumbs of sugar or lay unconscious next to jars of cherry jam. I brushed the dirt out of my hair and rinsed it from my face and all I could hear, even in the early morning, was the howling of sirens over the frenzied songs of birds, which chirped and chirped and chirped.
In August, I enrolled at Humboldt Universität for philosophy and art history, not because I wanted to study but because I wanted the free U-Bahn pass. And so I let the glittery, destructive underworld of Berlin sink its fangs into me, my solitude alleviated only when I went out at night and got lost in some apartment with tattooed men and women who did poppers underneath a framed picture of Ulrike Meinhof. Then I went home, my nose bleeding, my hair smelling of cigarette smoke, and was confronted by that disappointed look on my father's face, my grandmother's suspended in a perpetual frown. I had been lifted out of the low-income district of hopelessness and sent to one of the best schools in the country, and yet here I was, my mother was dead, soon the city would be covered in snow again, and I was ravaged by the hunger to ruin my life.
Autumn was short and humid, and then, overnight, it was winter. On the news, I saw middle-aged men with pearlescent smiles and young blond TV anchors in starched suits reporting about the financial crisis, the lack of jobs, the jammed Eurotunnel, snow collecting on the spires of basilicas in Northern Italy, and somewhere, everywhere, a missing girl, or an Arab man detained for terrorism, or a building with asylum seekers set on fire. In Berlin, the cathedrals' stained glass was covered with frost, and most days, I put on my red hat and my black coat and walked out into the crunchy snow to my job at the jazz café...
Excerpted from Good Girl by Aria Aber. Copyright © 2025 by Aria Aber. Excerpted by permission of Hogarth Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Only a few paragraphs into Aria Aber's Good Girl, the sentences begin to vibrate with the bass-heavy techno that propels this formidable debut forward. The narrator, Nila, daughter of Afghan doctors forced by war to flee Kabul, has just finished boarding school in the German countryside and returns to Berlin "ravaged by the hunger to ruin [her] life." Stifled by her father's resentment at his refugee status and scarred by the death of her mother, she feels an overwhelming urge to throw herself into a world of easy-come drugs and sudden, wordless sex. Luckily, the German capital's legendary clubs are happy to oblige.
Nila starts spending her nights at The Bunker, a converted heating plant in the desolate sprawl of the city's old communist East. The club's ethos is "come as you are," as long as you come as the infamously authoritarian bouncers demand you be. That means a lot of black leather, fishnet—or simply nothing at all. In the haze of one drug-fueled evening, Nila stumbles across Marlowe, a handsome American writer in his 30s living off the fame of a hit novel published in his youth. Nila is 18 and Marlowe has a girlfriend. But this is Berlin: no time for bourgeois morality. One crooked smile from the has-been author and Nila soon finds herself in a predictable series of interlocking love triangles.
The hook-up starts ill-advisedly and deteriorates from there. This central axis of the novel is in many ways its weakest aspect. Remove the prodigious drug use and occasional sadomasochism and you'll find Nila and Marlowe follow all the familiar contours of any doomed teenage romance. (After all—and to the surprise of no one—Marlowe turns out to be a teenager trapped inside a 36-year-old's body.) What's more, the couple and their entourage exude all the noxious over-seriousness of over-educated youth. They describe things as "Deleuzian," have dogs named for prominent Soviets. Nila's past-tense narration comes from an ostensibly older and wiser place, but she's clearly kept her penchant for pretension. At one point she tells the reader how she is "troubled by the fundamental uncertainty inherent in post-structuralist theories"; the reader, in turn, may be troubled by the complete earnestness with which she says this.
The novel is far more interesting and Aber's writing skills far more affecting when trained on Nila's reckoning with her identity. Never having visited the country of her parents' birth, she senses a chasm between herself and them; but although born and raised in Germany, she knows too that she'll always be taken for an auslander—a foreigner from someplace or other. Growing up in a post-9/11 world, with daily life punctuated by spasms of neo-Nazi violence against immigrants with "a southern look," Nila consciously snips off her Afghan roots in public. Sometimes she tells her friends she's Italian; other times, Colombian or Greek. The wounds of this internal exile cut deep, and Aber traces their emotional scars with heart-breaking intensity.
Good Girl may not be a flawless debut, but it has all the best qualities and the most endearing flaws of the city in which it was born: fierce, self-important, wild, and fearless. Aber, who started her literary career as a poet, isn't afraid to try her hand at a daring and arresting image; indeed, she appears afraid of very little. She captures brilliantly the agony and the ecstasy playing out on every Berlin street corner, as well as the feverish search for meaning—or, failing that, just feeling—that drives Nila to the city's "ghetto-heart." This is a blistering, pulsating coming-of-age story, powerfully written by an author who knows how to make her mark.
Reviewed by Alex Russell
Jamil Jan Kochai, author of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak, finalist for the National Book Award
Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
Raven Leilani, New York Times bestselling author of Luster
In Aria Aber's Good Girl, narrator Nila spends her teenage years in the labyrinths of Berlin's legendary techno clubs. Awash with drugs and unrestrained by straight-laced sexual mores, the Berlin club scene was hand-built by grassroots pioneers into a recognized cultural institution, eventually attracting visitors from across the globe desperate to sample its anything-goes spirit.
West Germany first began developing a taste for electronic music in the 1980s, influenced by the emerging techno artists of Detroit. But it was only after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that the capital city's club scene truly exploded. With huge numbers of East Berliners migrating westward, large swathes of former communist neighborhoods were abandoned—allowing for a rapid influx of poor artists and radicals. Squatting in empty apartment blocks, and sometimes entire streets, these communities cultivated a DIY ethos and atmosphere of boundless experimentation that marked a break from both the capitalism of the West and the repressive communism of the East. (Some original collectives survive to this day, despite numerous attempts by developers to evict them from their premises.)
With newfound freedom, clubs began popping up throughout Berlin in the early 1990s. And in the true spirit of the city's squats, these first clubs emerged out of raves held illegally in abandoned buildings, often right in the city center. Tresor and WMF, for example—set up in the basement of an old department store and a defunct kitchenware factory, respectively—could be found at Potsdamer Platz, better known as home to the Ritz Carlton and the Berlin Philharmonic. But perhaps the most emblematic venue of early Berlin techno was Bunker, the site which lends its name to Aber's fictional club in Good Girl. Known as being "the hardest club on earth," Bunker was housed in an imposing Nazi-era air-raid shelter in the heart of the city. Alongside the music, it was renowned for its "Snax" nights: male-only "pervy parties" with a fetish gear dress code.
Despite being widely popular in the Berlin underground, these uninhibited all-night raves were held in lower esteem by the German authorities. Only a handful of the first pop-up clubs survived the '90s and its waves of eviction and forced closure. In the decades that followed, however, club owners began laying the foundations for longer-term stability. Clubs like Tresor and the sex-positive KitKatClub found more permanent venues on Köpenicker Straße, while the now-legendary Berghain, opened in 2004 in a cavernous former power plant, can trace its origins to Bunker, Snax parties, and the early pioneers of Berlin techno.
Today, an estimated €1.5 billion is generated annually by the city's club culture, mostly through tourism; Berghain has been officially designated a "cultural institution," granting it the same tax benefits as museums and theatres. Given the radical anti-establishment ethos on which the scene was founded, this absorption into the German cultural fabric sits uneasily with some die-hard adherents. Even the Berlin city website admits its nightlife today is "a somewhat more commercial experience than the illegal raves of the '90s."
Nevertheless, Berlin club owners see state aid as paramount to surviving long into the 21st century. Sky-high operating costs, emboldened real-estate investors, and the past and ongoing damage of Covid spell existential threat for the sector—fears made manifest by the recent closure of the clubs Watergate and Wilde Renate, two mainstays opened in the 2000s. The Berlin Club Commission, a body comprising club owners and event organizers, recently released a report stating almost half of clubs surveyed were considering shutting up shop in 2025. The German language has even invented a new word for the phenomenon: Clubsterben. Club death. The landscape looks bleak for all-night ravers, and only time will tell if this vibrant, unique culture can hang on.
Berlin club Tresor in 2003, via Wikimedia Commons
Filed under Places, Cultures & Identities
By Alex Russell
A fascinating historical novel about Hilde, a former orphan, who experiences Berlin on the cusp of World War II and discovers her own voice and sexuality and finds a family when she gets a job at a cabaret, by award-winning author Kip Wilson.
Finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction.
Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, BuzzFeed, Bustle, and Electric Literature, Lisa Ko's debut novel is essential reading for our times.
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