Broken Glass Park: A Novel

By Alina Bronsky

In this “riveting debut” a Russian teenager living in Berlin dreams of taking revenge on the man who killed her mother—“A stark, moving tale of resiliency” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

A finalist for the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize

Now an award-winning motion picture

Seventeen-year-old Sascha Naimann was born in Moscow, but now lives in Berlin with her two younger siblings. She is precocious, independent, streetwise, and ever since her stepfather Vadim murdered her mother several months ago, an orphan. Unlike most of her peers, Sascha doesn’t dream of escaping the grim housing project where they live. Sascha’s dreams of writing a novel about her beautiful but naïve mother . . . and of taking Vadim’s life.

In a voice that is candid and self-confident, by turns childlike and mature, Sascha relates the internal struggle between those forces that can destroy us, and those that lead us out of sorrow and back to life. Broken Glass Park goes straight to the heart of what it means to be young, alive, and conscious in these first decades of the new millenium.

“A gripping portrayal of life on the margins of society.” —Freundin magazine (Germany)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 30, 2010
• ISBN: 9781609459703

Alina Bronsky

Alina Bronksy is the author of Broken Glass Park (Europa, 2010); The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (Europa, 2011), named a Best Book of 2011 by The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, and Publishers Weekly; Just Call Me Superhero (Europa, 2014), Baba Dunja’s Last Love (Europa, 2016), and My Grandmother’s Braid (Europa, 2021). Born in Yekaterinburg, an industrial town at the foot of the Ural Mountains in central Russia, Bronsky now lives in Berlin.

Book preview

Alina Bronsky

BROKEN GLASS PARK

Translated form the German

by Tim Mohr

Europa Editions

116 East 16th Street

New York, NY

[e-mail]

www.europaeditions.com

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2008 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln

First Publication 2010 by Europa Editions

Translation by Tim Mohr

Original title: Scherbenpark

Translation copyright © 2010 by Europa Editions

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

The translation of this work was supported 

by a grant from the Goethe-Institut 

which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

www.mekkanografici.com

ISBN 9781609459703

For Galina, Leonid, and Michael.

In memory of Nadezhda Zotova.

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 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.

Most of the people who live around here don’t have any dreams at all. I’ve asked. And the dreams of the ones who do have them are so pathetic that if I were in their shoes I’d rather not have any.

Anna’s dream, for instance, is to marry rich. Her dream man would be a judge in his mid-thirties, and, fingers crossed, not too terribly ugly.

Anna is seventeen, same as I am, and she says she’d get married immediately if a guy like that came along. That way she could finally move out of the Emerald and into the judge’s penthouse apartment. Nobody but me knows that Anna sometimes takes the tram downtown and wanders a dozen times around the courthouse in the hope that her judge will finally come out and discover her, give her a red rose, take her out for ice cream, and then invite her back to his penthouse.

She says you’ll never get lucky if you don’t fight for it; if you don’t fight, the moment will just pass you by.

Do you have any idea what Emerald means, you stupid cow? I ask her. It’s the most elegant way to cut a diamond, and a fine gemstone itself. That’s got to be appealing to you. You’ll never live in another Emerald if you move out of this place.

You just made that up. They would never in a million years have named this heap of concrete after a diamond cut, says Anna. And by the way, when you know too much, you get old and wrinkled faster. That’s a Russian saying.

As Anna’s judge could take a while, for now she’s sleeping with Valentin, who has a third-rate dream of his own. He wants a brand-new, snow-white Mercedes. First he’ll have to get his driver’s license. Which costs a lot. That’s why he delivers advertising brochures door to door before school. Since the money to be made at that is barely a trickle, Valentin also cleans the house of an old married couple twice a week. The couple lives on the other side of town. He got the job through his mother, who cleans the place next door. Nobody can know he’s a housecleaner—if the guys at school found out, they’d never let him live it down, and Anna would split up with him.

Valentin usually has a look on his face as if someone just shoved a cactus down his pants. I think it’s because he realizes that even if he eventually gets enough money together to take driver’s ed classes and get his license, it would take another two lifetimes of cleaning houses to buy a white Mercedes. And then maybe in his third lifetime he’d be able to hop in and actually take a spin.

Peter the Great, on the other hand, dreams of a natural blonde with dark eyes. He was with Anna before. She has brown eyes but she’s not natural—not natural blond, anyway. Now he’s with another girl, one from his class at school. But it’s less convenient, as she lives downtown rather than here in the Emerald. Since they got together, he complains he spends half his life on the tram. But while he’s on it, he keeps his eyes peeled for other blondes.

He was never interested in me—my hair’s too dark.

My name is Sascha Naimann. I’m not a guy, even though everyone in this country seems to think so when they hear my name. I’ve given up counting how often I’ve had to explain it to people. Sascha is a short form of Alexander and Alexandra. I’m an Alexandra. But my name is Sascha—that’s what my mother always called me, and that’s what I want to be called. When people address me as Alexandra, I don’t even react. That used to happen a lot more when I was new in school. These days it only happens when there’s a new teacher.

Sometimes I think I don’t ever want to meet any new people because I’m sick of having to explain everything from scratch. Why my name is Sascha and how long I’ve lived in Germany and how come I speak German so well—ten times better than all the other Russian Germans put together.

I know German because my head is filled with a gray matter shaped like a big walnut. Macroscopically it has lots of ridges and microscopically loads of synapses. I probably have a few million more than Anna—definitely. Besides German, I also know physics, chemistry, English, French, and Latin. If I ever get a B on an assignment, the teacher comes over to me and apologizes.

I’m particularly good at math. When we came to Germany seven years ago, math was the only subject I could handle right away, in the fifth grade. Truth be told, I could have solved the eighth grade assignments. Back in Russia I was in a special math school.

In Germany I couldn’t speak a word at first, but the numbers were the same. I always solved the equations first, and always correctly. I was the only one in class who had any idea what algebra and geometry were. My classmates acted as if they were diseases.

My mother laughed about it and said she found me a little scary. I was always scary in her eyes, though, because I thought much more logically than she did. She wasn’t stupid, but she was too sentimental. She read at least one thick novel per week, played piano and guitar, knew a million songs, and was good at languages. Learned German real fast, for instance—and before that was able to communicate with people in passable English.

Math, physics, chemistry—she was no good at them. Just as she was no good at recognizing when it was time to show a man the door. These are all abilities I must have gotten from my father. All I know about him is that he had multiple doctorates and an unpleasant personality. You got that, too, my mother used to say. And the degrees will no doubt come at some point.

I’m the only one from our community who goes to the Alfred Delp school. It’s a private Catholic school, and to this day I have no idea why they accepted me back then—pretty much illiterate, never baptized, looking completely out of step in a pink wool sweater my grandmother had knitted. Being led by the hand by a mother only able to speak broken English—very loudly, with a ridiculous accent—and who wore her flaming red hair down. In her other hand was a liter of milk in a plastic bag from a discount grocery store.

Along with my mother, hundreds of German Catholic architects, doctors, and lawyers had applied for spots at the school for their kids. All people who practically had GENEROUS DONOR written across their foreheads in big letters.

You see, at the Alfred Delp school there’s no tuition, but donations are welcome. And Mrs. Weimars, the school secretary who peered over the top of her glasses to size up my mother, me, and the plastic bag, must have quickly come to a realistic assessment of my mother’s liquidity (as those of us at such elite schools call it).

Actually, after I started attending the school, my mother did give twenty euros the first year and twenty-two the next—which was all she could afford. She couldn’t really afford those amounts, to be honest, but my mother was a fundamentally giving person. There’s nothing I hate more than a leech was one of her favorite sentences. It’s a quality you hate only in yourself, I would always answer. Try hating it in others—like Vadim, for instance.

In retrospect, I think they accepted me at the school to try to create a little diversity. A lot of doctors, lawyers, and architects got rejection notices for their kids. In the end there were five sections of fifth graders, each one crammed full, and in mine, 5C, I was the only one with an immigrant background. In 5A was a kid with an American father, and in 5B another with a French mother. In all my years there I’ve never seen a single black kid or anyone who looked even vaguely Middle Eastern. So in my class I was the heavyweight when it came to diversity.

On the first day of school my classmates stared at me as if I had just climbed out of a UFO. They asked me questions I couldn’t understand at first. Soon I could have answered them, but by then they all thought I was standoffish. It took a while for them to learn otherwise.

Considering most of them had never seen a foreigner up close before, they were all pretty nice to me. One of the first sentences I was able to understand was a compliment about my sweater. Probably out of pity. A little later, when I had learned to talk, count, and write papers and was the only one who put commas in the right places, everyone acted like they were happy for me. And maybe it was sincere.

My mother was always saying I should have friends from school over to our place. But she only said that because she was clueless. She was always inviting friends over. Twice I’d been over to the homes of girls from my class—Melanie and Carla—and I couldn’t possibly imagine having them over.

I’m not sure what threw me more: the neatness of Melanie’s room, the scent of the polished furniture—the type of furniture I thought existed only in catalogues or Anna’s fantasies—the fact that they sat around an oval dining room table for lunch instead of in the kitchen, or her horse-pattern sheets. I’d never seen such colorful sheets before. At home we had white or light-blue checked sheets, all of which were old and faded. How you could possibly fall asleep with your eyes flitting around looking at all those horses?

Melanie’s mother, by the way, was originally from Hungary. That came as a complete surprise—for one thing because Melanie had never mentioned it, and for another because she looked more stereotypically German than any other girl in our entire school. She was exactly what foreigners picture when they think of a young German girl—particularly foreigners who form that image from afar, having never been to Germany.

She had freshly cropped, always-neat, chin-length blond hair, blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and a crisply ironed jean jacket. 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. If I hadn’t have seen her in the flesh myself, I would never have believed someone like her actually existed.

Her mom, on the other hand, spoke with an accent—though I didn’t notice it the first time I went over there. Back then my own accent screeched as distractingly as a rusty bicycle. During lunch she stared at me with pity when she thought I wasn’t looking. She asked me questions about the town where I had grown up, the weather there, my old school, and my mother.

I told her that my mother had studied art history, that back home she had acted in a theater group that kept getting banned, that she wanted to find a little company here to join. Melanie’s mother took a sip of water and segued into a different line of questioning: wasn’t life in our housing project dangerous? I told her it was a lot cleaner and nicer than where I’d lived back there. I always referred to Russia that way—back there.

Melanie nibbled on her cheese-filled puff pastry and corrected her mother whenever she made a grammatical error. She also told her mother that they’d done a poll in class about what people wanted for their birthdays and seven students had said they wanted new stereos.

So what? said her mother, looking at Melanie through narrowed eyes.

Don’t you understand what that means? said Melanie, opening her blue eyes wide. A new stereo. Meaning they already have one. And I still don’t have one.

But you do have one in your room, I said. I couldn’t talk very well, but I talked a lot.

That’s just an old system my cousin was getting rid of, Melanie said. It doesn’t have any of the features a stereo has to have these days.

After lunch we went back into her spotless room. She turned on the stereo. I found a stack of old teen magazines and started reading them. Melanie spun herself around on her desk chair and chatted on the phone with another friend. Considering we didn’t have anything to say to each other, we made good use of the time. That evening Melanie’s mother drove me home. When we got there she looked around, unsettled, and insisted on taking me to the door to make sure I got home to my mother.

But my mother wasn’t home. I had a key.

You should come over again, said Melanie’s mother, patting my cheek.

Thanks, I said, thinking to myself, Not until there’s a new stack of magazines.

After that I looked at our apartment in a different light.

I pictured spotless Melanie in her pressed jean jacket taking the elevator with me. I pictured the way she would look around, fidgeting, like her mother. The way the scent of her soap would fight with the smell of urine in the hallway—and lose. I pictured her coming through the door of our apartment, catching sight of the couch we’d found discarded by a dumpster and the little table in front of it that would collapse if you even looked at it too hard. Books on the floor. The little TV and stack of videocassettes—even back then nobody had VHS tapes anymore. The cabinet with no door. My stepfather’s socks drying on the radiator. My brother’s sweatpants draped over a chair. We had five chairs, each one different because we’d found them separately, each left out on the street the night before a heavy garbage pickup.

We always ate in the kitchen, except when we had guests over for a party—in which case we had to clear out the main room to be able to fit extra chairs borrowed from neighbors. Our kitchen table was usually covered with jars of jam, letters, postcards, half-empty bottles, and old newspapers. We had twenty plates; none matched any of the others. My mother had bought them all individually at the flea market.

We didn’t have a dishwasher back then, and sometimes all twenty plates would stack up in the sink before my mother washed them up. Sometimes I did it, but not very often. And never when Vadim told me to—the same Vadim who left the frying pan crusted with the remains of his fried eggs. Though when his foul mouth started muttering my mother’s name menacingly, I cleaned up real fast.

I hate men.

Anna says good men do exist. Nice, friendly men who cook and help clean up and who earn money. Men who want to have children and give gifts and plan vacations. Who wear clean clothes, don’t drink, and even look halfway decent. Where on earth are they, I ask. She says they’re out there—if not in our town then in Frankfurt. But she doesn’t know any personally, unless you count people she’s seen on TV.

That’s why I always repeat the words my mother used to say: I don’t need a man.

Of course, though she always said that, she never stuck to it.

Ever since I decided to kill Vadim, I’ve felt a lot better. I also promised Anton, my nine-year-old little brother, that I’d do it. And I think he feels better now, too. When I told him, he opened his eyes wide and asked, breathless, How are you going to do it?

I acted as if I had everything under control. There’s a thousand ways I could do it, I told him. I could poison him, suffocate him, strangle him, stab him, push him off a balcony, run him over in a car.

You don’t have a car, said my brother Anton—and he was right.

I can’t get at him at the moment anyway, I said. You know he’s still in prison. He’ll be there for years.

Is that how long it’s going to take? said Anton.

Yeah, I said, but it’s better that way—I’ll have plenty of time to plan it out. It’s not that easy to kill somebody when you’ve never done it before, you know.

It’ll be easier the second time around, said Anton like an expert.

I just want to pull it off this one time, I said. I don’t want to make a hobby out of it.

I was relieved that Anton also thought it was a good idea. Vadim is his father, after all. But the little guy hates him just as much as I do. Maybe even more. He had already been a basket case beforehand, because unlike me he was always afraid of Vadim.

These days Anton’s still in bad shape, showing no signs of improvement, and I sometimes ask myself whether all the therapy will do any good at all. He stutters, can’t concentrate in school, wets his bed, and starts to shake whenever someone raises their voice. All this despite the fact that he claims not to remember anything. I always tell him: count yourself lucky if that’s the case. I’m happy I can’t remember anything, either—even though I was there.

I can discuss one of my dreams with Anton. But not the other one. Because anytime the word mama is mentioned in his vicinity, he freezes and just sits there dead still like a statue—as if he’s just been kissed by the Snow Queen. My mother often read us the fairytale of the Snow Queen. She loved Hans Christian Andersen, loved that story in particular. Whenever somebody was mean, she would say they probably had a piece of the mirror in their eye or heart—she meant the mirror from the Snow

Reviews for Broken Glass Park

[yourotherleft_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Sascha Naimann is not like the rest of the people who live in her broken down apartment building in Berlin. They don't have dreams, or if they do, their dreams are stupid and shallow. Sascha, however, has two dreams, two important goals in life. One is to write a book about her mother, the other is to kill the man who murdered her mother. Broken Glass Park is Sascha's story. It's obvious right from the start that Sascha is a different sort of narrator. She's not soft or sympathetic. Despite the bad hand life seems to have dealt her, Sascha isn't looking for pity. She's prickly at best and, at worst, downright cruel to the people who have the misfortune of stumbling into her path. Yet, she is intelligent. She is her half-brother and sister's fierce protector and a determined force in seeing that they are educated and brought up properly. She loves her mother as much as she hated her mother for her weakness and foolishness. She claims to loathe men, yet can't stop herself from wanting to be desired by them. Sascha is a study in contradictions and a narrator that is hard to understand and even harder to love.Told from Sascha's first person point of view, Broken Glass Park is brutal. Bronsky doesn't shy away from uncomfortable subjects. She gives us glimpses of a certain sensitivity and nobility in Sascha, but never long enough for us to forget the narrator's angry, cruel streak. Just as Sascha doesn't let anyone in her life get too near, we, the readers, aren't allowed to get too near either, just stand to the side reading as Sascha battles her way through the remainder of her deeply troubled youth.Broken Glass Park is a story that is undeniably well-told. Sascha's character, whether you like her or not, is vividly created in Bronsky's spare, straight-forward prose nicely translated from German by Tim Mohr. All her contradictions and her confusion are laid bare for us and despite being unable to love her, as a reader, you can't help but hope for a redemptive end to Sascha's story. Unfortunately, however, I didn't love the book. While I read the whole thing and found the narrator's voice unique and at times captivating, I felt as if I were never fully engrossed in the story. The rough nature of the story and the narrator's prickly, cruel, self-destructive personality were often off-putting which kept me from being entirely taken in by it. More than once I found myself frustrated and perplexed by Sascha's actions, which inasmuch as it may be indicative of a strong well-written character, didn't make Broken Glass Park a particularly rewarding reading experience for me. It was real, and it was gritty, perhaps, a bit too gritty and real for my tastes.

[snash_44 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Set in Germany the book is about a 17 year old Russian immigrant, an intelligent gutsy girl overwhelmed by anger. It is well written and the character believable. At various points it seems that the plot could get sentimental, soppy, and unbelievable. It never succumbs to that but rather allows the complexity of human needs and desires to drive the plot. I thought it a very good book

[lahochstetler · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sascha Naimann is a street-smart orphan, left alone with her younger brother and sister when her stepfather shoots her mother. Sascha's main goal in life is to shoot her stepfather, Vadim, when he is released from prison. The children are now cared for by one of Vadim's cousins, though Sascha, at seventeen, clearly wields the power in the household. Sascha is one of the few in her predominantly-Russian housing complex who speaks German. Generally I enjoyed this book, though it could have used a stronger plot. Aside from killing Vadim, Sascha's life is scattered, as is the action. I felt like the plot was wavering. Bronsky's book does show the remarkably power that precocious teenage girls can wield over men, though I did find Sascha's relationship with the newspaper editor to be creepy, at best.

[brenzi_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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 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.

[arubabookwoman · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is Bronsky's first novel, and it shows. It opens wonderfully: "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 Redheaded Woman Who Would Still Be Alive If Only She Had Listened To Her Smart Older Daughter."Bronsky created a wonderful narrative voice for Sacha, the "smart older daughter." When the novel opens, Sacha's mother has been murdered by her stepfather, and Sacha, with her two younger siblings, living in an impoverished immigrant area of Berlin, must cope as she deals with her anger and her grief. Unfortunately, the book just doesn't seem to hold together. It wandered a lot, as if Bronsky wasn't quite sure where she wanted to take Sacha, and included Sacha having a fairly creepy relationship with a middle-aged journalist. Despite some good parts, this was basically an unsatisfactory read.2 1/2 generous stars

[anovelsource1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have to admit Broken Glass Park was not an easy read. It was gritty, raw and real. There were moments when I just had to set the book aside and go do something else ~ why? Sascha is the storyteller and the one I wanted to just take in my arms and rock her like a little baby although she was a 17 year old girl. She had been left to deal with the aftermath of her mother's murder by her step-father in front of her younger brother and sister and herself in an apartment very similar to what she compared to Eminem's 8 mile trailer.what i liked ~ * Sascha's voice - she was a REAL teenager; what I remember being like when I was a teenager * the quotes! I love quotes anyways and Sascha had some that blew me away with her wisdom! * The realism. Rarely do I read a book about child abuse or spousal abuse that is written with honesty, grit, and blunt reality like this one. As I've said before, I worked for 15 years with child abuse victims, reading all kinds of books about the subject, and this is one I will recommend.what i did not like ~ * i'm not sure if it was a translation problem or if this was just how the book was but there's transition issues; sometimes i was not sure who was speaking, who the new person in the picture was. For example she meets a college guy named Volker who has the same name as the newspaper editor who she sees as her savior. With the college Volker he just suddenly appears and I didn't know who he was. Perhaps it was to show how messed up Sascha was in her mental state at the moment but as a reader I had trouble catching up. * Some things were left hanging ~ will there be a sequel? will I find out what happened to everybody? both Volkers? Felix? Sascha? Ack! I want to know!I did look up this one drink that is mentioned in the book. Let me also say Alina Bronsky was born in Russia and grew up in Germany from the time she was 13 until she was an adult. Broken Glass Park was first published in Germany. With that said, there is a drink mentioned in the book that is forced down the college Volker's throat in a tough scene IN broken glass park. The drink is called "sailor's tea." I've included a bit below from what I found on a website that was not written in Russian or German! Everything I read warned strongly how this drink can KILL. Very scary! I knew those Russians had strong stomachs and the ability to drink anyone under the table but tea that kills?!? by the way, this tea is often mixed with VODKA! Geez can it get any stronger!?! Never drink the zavarka undiluted. It has a strong narcotic effect, causing intense heartbeat, hallucinations and restlessness. This effect has been widely used by captives in Russian prisons and forced labor camps, since tea has always been included into the rations of the prisoners. The name of tea-based narcotics in the Russian criminal slang is "chephyr". If you introduce Russian tea-drinking into some non-Russian company, don't forget to label the zavarka pot! Otherwise, ignorant people might drink its content, and die of a heart attack as a consequence. You, in turn, may face lawsuits or vendetta depending on the culture you live in. Since the outstanding Russian chemist, Dmitrij Ivanovich Mendeleyev (same guy who devised the periodic table of elements) invented and standardized the technology of 40% vol/vol vodka production, you have Absolut control over the alcohol content of your tea. If the ratio of vodka does not exceed one third, we speak of tea with vodka. If it is between one and two thirds, we speak of a sailor's tea. Beyond that, it is contaminated (or pure) vodka. But come on, hackers claim to be intellectuals, right? You will need your braincells in the future. Sailor's TeaI liked this book overall. I think it reflects how children and youth have to cope when there is not a support system around and their lives fall apart, literally. This book is definitely not for younger teens as it contains strong sexual content and physical violence. I WILL and DO recommend this book to my child abuse victims assistance workers and the older teenagers. I also recommend this book to anyone who wants to know what it's like to live in the Russian Ghetto of Germany. A truly powerful book.

[imbookingit · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I found this a very interesting book, in spite of not being able to really connect with the protagonist.I found Sacha fascinating, but I never quite felt I understood her, either intellectually or emotionally. It isn't that I found her unconvincing. I always believed she was acting in character. She was just... foreign to me. When I thought about it, I realized her life was so different than mine that I was having trouble bridging the gap.I was fascinated by the look at a culture inside a culture, a very poor Russian immigrant community in Germany. Sacha was a misfit because of her personality, and possibly would have been one wherever she was. She didn't fit into the wider community because she was part of the poor Russian tenements, but she has too many goals for her life to fit in with the discouraged teens in her area.She's taken on responsibility for her siblings, a responsibility that leads her to decide she much protect them from their father when he is finally released from jail.At the same time, she's feeling the need to escape her life, and makes the first steps towards doing this. Along the way, she discovers a whole different world than her own, takes some time to explore her sexuality, and after all this makes some decisions that didn't make sense to me.A very interesting read.

[theloopylibrarian · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sascha is a vulnerable girl hiding behind a tough veneer. I couldn’t help but admire her candor and her unflinching fight to deal with a disturbing childhood filled with domestic violence and childhood abuse. The author told Sascha’s story without sentimentality but with a straightforwardness that was refreshing yet brutal in its honesty. The writing was sparse and lyrical. I couldn’t put it down.

[nosajeel · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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 and helpless. Following her mother's death she starts to spin further out of control. Has to be read.

[alexann_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This atmospheric and, yes, surreal, novel takes place in a community of Russian immigrants in Germany. They cluster together in what sounds like a "project" or ghetto in the city. Sascha is seventeen, and the head of her family, although she and her brother and sister do have a housekeeper who is supposed to be in charge. Sascha's mother and her boyfriend were murdered two years ago by Sascha's step-father, and her goal in life is to kill him. Much of her energy is consumed by thinking of ways to murder Vadim. She has plenty of time to plan because God only knows how long he will be in prison. Sascha also worries about her younger brother who saw and was traumatized by the murders. Marie seems incapable of learning German, so most of the responsibility for caring for the little ones falls to Sascha.Then through a fluke, she meets Volker, a professional man, and his son Felix, and her life changes.

[alisonsbookmarks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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 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?

[lkernagh · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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 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.

[timbazzett · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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 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