Broken Glass Park

Alina Bronsky did a superb job with writing in a teen's point of view. Sascha (the main character) is tough, tender, smart, acid, & painfully realistic. Her story is both heartbreaking & funny as it blows by you at a breakneck pace. (However, there is one point where the pacing changed somewhat & it threw me to the point that I flipped back a couple of pages, thinking I had somehow skipped a page or two....) An unflinching look at an immigrant life lived on the fringe, surviving violent circumstances, moving forward (sometimes backward) in spite of it all....

A gritty, contemporary coming-of-age story with themes of friendship, domestic violence, loss, retribution and restitution. 17-year-old Sascha, a Russian émigré to Germany, makes an interesting and unpredictable first-person narrator. She is street-smart, intimidating and fearless. She is also, at times, squeamish, vulnerable and naïve. Sometimes she acts mature beyond her years and other times is strangely childlike, veering off into unexpected moments of self destruction, promiscuity, mania and depression. Sascha’s narrative voice is fantastic. One of piercing honesty, imbued with both a gentle love (for her siblings) and a barely contained rage (against her mother’s murderer).

I give Bronsky full marks for creating such a show more fascinating character in Sascha. The plot is where the story struggles. At times the plot is disjointed, meandering and off-pace. This works okay to depict an individual (Sascha) spinning out of control, but some events seem to have been included more for shock value than as events for logical plot development. That being said, Bronsky does pack a lot into this story. While I found Sascha’s relationship with the newspaper editor Volker and his son Felix to be rather unusual, I felt real compassion for the characters, including Sascha’s Russian aunt Maria, who struggles to adapt to life in Germany. Laced with wicked humour and smart dialogue, the end result is an uneven story that shines because of its compelling characters. For a debut novel, Bronsky provides a young, edgy, smart talking voice that is shouting to be heard.

Definitely looking forward to reading more of Bronsky's books. show less

Wow! Quite a coming of age story, although BROKEN GLASS PARK's heroine, Sascha, at seventeen has already been through some very serious and traumatic stuff, so she's pretty much already "come of age," and now she's just fighting for her own survival and that of her two younger half-siblings. The story is set in a housing project on the edge of Frankfurt (yeah, Germany - the novel is translated from German) filled mostly with poor Russian emigrants. Sascha, an all-A student, has become fluent in German, as well as English and French, is determined to that "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps," and is doing pretty well, despite numerous obstacles. Her "guardian" is a near-illiterate distant cousin of her stepfather, who is now in show more prison - for killing her mother. And no, I'm not really giving anything away here. Like I said, there's a lot of very serious, messy, dysfunctional s**t going on here. But I think I'll stop here. BROKEN GLASS PARK was Russian-German Alina Bronsky's first book, and apparently created quite a sensation over in Germany when it was first published several years back, even winning some prizes. Imagine if Holden Caulfield were a girl, only much harder, tougher. Now transplant him to present day Germany and have Sam Peckinpah write his story. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

I was so swept up in this book, I forgot to take notes for my review! I'm shocked that we're not hearing more about this book.

Broken Glass Park is a story told from the point of view of seventeen year old Sascha Naimann.

Sascha, the main character, may only be seventeen, but she is gritty, feisty and angry enough to make the reader question whether or not we should root for her. She is described in the book as "prickly" and "defensive" but we catch glimpses of her softness, especially towards her two younger siblings, that make us fall in love with her. Sascha struggles between her age and her maturity, as she was thrust into adulthood way before the murder of her mother. I couldn't help but sympathize for her situation - she watched show more her mother be gunned down by her stepfather, Vadim, who was nothing but awful to all three of the children - but at the same time she takes risks and is at times utterly cruel to the rest of the world. Maybe she feels she has the right, since the world has been nothing but cruel to her.

I have to share the first few lines with you:

"Sometimes I think I'm the only one in our neighborhood with any worthwhile dreams. I have two, and there's no reason to be ashamed of either one. I want to kill Vadim. And I want to write a book about my mother. I already have a title: The Story of an Idiotic Readheaded Woman Who Would Still Be Alive If Only She Had Listened To Her Smart Oldest Daughter."

Broken Glass Park is an amazing debut novel unlike anything I had ever read before. This is one of those books that I never would have discovered if I didn't have Alison's Book Marks. Many thanks to Regal Literary for bringing Alina Bronsky into my world!

Powerful writing, compelling characters, and a storyline that kept the pages turning. What more could a reader ask for? show less

The only word that comes to mind when I think about Russian author Alina Bronsky is audacious. I’m not sure how old she is but this, her debut novel, is the second novel I’ve read (apparently, I’m reading her works in reverse order of publication) and she is definitely a risk-taker. Daring, bold, impudent, whatever adjective you choose to attach to her name, her writing provides for a remarkable look at the lives of Russian immigrants in modern-day Germany. And you can count on a unique and inimitable voice. In Broken Glass Park, that voice belongs to seventeen year old Sachsa Naimann and the book’s first paragraph provides an introduction to this brash teenage girl:

”Sometimes I think I’m the only one in our neighborhood show more with any worthwhile dreams. I have two, and there’s no reason to be ashamed of either one. I want to kill Vadim. And I want to write a book about my mother. I already have a title: The Story of an Idiotic Redheaded Woman Who Would Still Be Alive If Only She Had Listened to Her Smart Oldest Daughter. Or maybe that’s more of a subtitle. But I have plenty of time to figure it out because I haven’t started writing yet.”

So now you know what the book is about. Sachsa lives with her younger brother and sister in a Russian ghetto. They’ve all been left orphans by the murder of their mother and the incarceration of their father. And if she weren’t so darn smart, she’d realize that her dream should be to get out of that ghetto by marrying a rich man like her friend Angela does.

But Sachsa keeps her eye on the prize and in the meantime, we learn what life is like for her, her siblings and their friends. And when she becomes infatuated with a handsome and caring older man, Sachsa’s life takes a dangerous and violent, turn.

I can’t say enough about the language, which is startlingly vivid and stark.

”The window shatters into a thousand glittering shards. For a fraction of a second they all hang in the air, a giant, weightless piece of art. Then they all plummet to the asphalt and break into even smaller pieces.” (Page 206)

Nothing left to do now except wait impatiently for Alina Bronsky’s next effort. Highly recommended. show less

Her fierceness. Her fragility. Alina Bronsky captures both qualities in her 17-year-old narrator and although you might not always like Sascha — you might not always like her choices, and you probably won’t like some of the things that happen (and have happened) to her — she is always believable.

And, often, compelling.

And, sometimes, captivating.

And, really, that’s all I need to keep me turning the pages.

But there is more. The novel relies heavily on dialogue and it is well-done, which builds credibility further. Fragments and half-thoughts. Slang and casual constructions.

This, in conjunction with the straightforward sentence structure, pushes the pacing of the novel. Although much of the action is internal — what Sascha is show more thinking, what she is remembering, what she is reviewing with recent events in mind, what she is planning — the style makes all of this seem very immediate and fresh.

The use of unadorned prose must be deliberate (and not simply a matter of translation). One of the characters is described as follows: “She smelled of soap and spoke in a chirpy voice using sentences of mostly monosyllabic words, words that popped out of her mouth like peas.”

Perhaps this rare metaphor also hints at the author’s wider stylistic intent: shelling nouns and verbs and objects, each one pinging against the bowl as it’s released from the pod, pulling the reader directly along the trajectory. That’s rather how it feels.

The novel’s theme, however, does not afford the same kind of matter-of-fact-ness. Sascha is on her own when it comes to figuring out how to cope with the tragedy in her life, and there is no direct line to resolution.

Sascha is striking out, unsure and restless. In contrast, her creator, Alina Bronsky, appears confident and ambitious; I am very keen to read her next work.

(More here if you're curious.) show less

A stunning novel, everyone should read it. This is Alina Bronsky's first novel. Her second, The Hottest Dishes of Tartar Cuisine, is also excellent. They have a lot in common: gritty stories of Russian emigrees in Germany told by unforgettable narrators. But they also show the range of Bronsky's imagination and voice not least the fact that this one is narrated by a 17 year old girl and Tartar Cuisine was narrated by a grandmother.

Broken Glass Park is a coming of age story with nothing whitewashed. Sascha lives in a Russian slum outside a German city. Her mother has just been murdered and she's left with her two half siblings and a relative who comes from Russia to take care of them. Sascha is brilliant, both cruel and kind, both strong show more and helpless. Following her mother's death she starts to spin further out of control. Has to be read. show less