Reading Skywards – Your Friendly Bookshelf

INFORMATION ABOUT THIS BOOK
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hogarth
Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 2025
Format:  Hardcover, Paperback, audiobook, and ebook
Print length ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
Genre:  Literary Fiction, Coming of Age Fiction

MY PERSONAL OPINION OF “GOOD GIRL”

I started a Read-a-thon for January with the Podcast Books, Etc and one of the prompts was “an award-winning prize”. This book caught my attention when I read the synopsis. This book also won the Whiting Award. The story is set in Berlin, which is one of my favorite cities in the world. It was a coming-of-age story “of a girl spiraling out of control… say no more.

I loved this book, the story line, the main character Nilab, the craziness of the time, the drugs and the techno parties, the never ending living life in the edge, and at the same time, the fear of loneliness, the heavy weight of pain from loosing a parent, the constant description of Berlin, the arts througout the book, it was like immersing in a piece of art.

The progression of losing ourselves, to find us in someone else, and then trying to find our way back, was touching and enduring. I borrowed this book from my local library, and I am planning on buying the hardcover.

This was my first 5-star read this year.

PREMISE OF THE BOOK AS FOUND IN AMAZON / GOODREADS:

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.

MY RATING: 5.0

QUOTES FROM THE BOOK

“I felt elated by the challenge, this group of friends who took David Foster Wallace too seriously and deodorant not seriously enough.”

“Art can unbolt your soul and reshape the fundamentals of your life.” 

“And though I knew the complexity of our fate couldn’t be reduced to a single sheet of paper, she nonetheless had a point: Evil expressed itself through administrative language.” 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: ARIA ABER

Aria Aber was born and raised in Germany and now lives in the United States. Her debut poetry collection, Hard Damage, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Whiting Award. She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and graduate student at USC, and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, The Yale Review, Granta, and elsewhere. Raised speaking Farsi and German, she writes in her third language, English. She recently joined the faculty of the University of Vermont as an assistant professor of Creative Writing and divides her time between Vermont and Brooklyn.

Bibliography:

• Hard Damage – Poetry