Good Girl

Starred review from October 14, 2024
Aber, who won the Whiting Award for her poetry collection, Hard Damage, makes her fiction debut with a stunning coming-of-age story set amid Berlin’s underground art and music scene. Nila, the daughter of Afghan refugees, was born shortly after Germany’s reunification in the city’s “ghetto-heart.” A self-described “small rat,” she grows into a wild child, ashamed of her parents’ poor grasp of the language and of her impoverished immigrant neighborhood, where cobwebs and swastika graffiti adorn the elevators of her building. She invents fictional identities at her all-girls Catholic boarding school, alternately claiming to be Greek, Colombian, or Israeli, and discovers a love for Kafka and photography. At 19, she keeps up her “pathological habit” of lying about her identity with a goup of dance club kids, with whom she takes acid, amphetamines, and ecstasy. She also develops a toxic relationship with Marlowe Woods, 36, a fixture on the techno music scene whose bright early career as a novelist has stalled. Aber casts Nila’s struggle to find herself against a turbulent backdrop of racial tensions, including the murder of Afghan brothers in their bakery, attacks on women in hijabs, and Germans’ xenophobic fear of people with a “southern look.” In the process, Aber offers readers both a piercing look into Nila’s psyche and an acute sense of place. It’s a remarkable achievement. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency.

Starred review from March 1, 2025

Poet Aber's (Hard Damage) intoxicating fiction debut rides the highs of youth, extraneous drugs, and artistic longing while also crashing into the depths of self-loathing, abuse, and fear. Born in Germany to Afghan parents, Nila seeks refuge from her family's expectations in raves and the toxic tendrils of an American writer as she finds her own voice as a photographer. In a performance that grounds Nila at the fraught, confusing precipice of adulthood, narrator Mozhan Navabi captures Nila's rapid oscillations between doing what is right for herself, those she loves, and her abusive lover. Aber's writing resonates with the pull of nightlife and the lure of artistic possibilities, set against the grinding reality of the outside world. As a narrator, Navabi grasps ugly and singed characters with seeming ease while staying true to Nila's idealism and youth. VERDICT Aber's gritty debut traces a young woman's existential search for agency and identity in a world where the "good girls" might be those who discard self-reproach and shame.--Kailyn Slater

Copyright 2025 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.