Early Reviewers

Where is your husband?

Nelli doesn't seem to be in crisis—or does she?

The quiet youngest daughter in a noisy, tangled German Mennonite family who fled from Russia in the 1990s, does she even know where she belongs?

Marriage, loyalty, faith, family: memory can be deceiving.

A tense and unusual situation boils over in this darkly entertaining psychological novel of contemporary German life.

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"Penner successfully captures the challenges, some overt but many more subtle, of leaving a native land associated with trauma and rejection but not being able to integrate into one’s imagined “homeland.”

... Although it is tempting to read such literature for what it tells us

about these communities... Nachtbeeren can and should be read first as a work of literature... Penner has an impressive control of her language, in several registers. The book is moving and funny." —Richard Ratzlaff, Journal of Mennonite Studies [review of German novel]