Once in a blue moon a debut novel comes along, announcing a voice quite unlike any other, with a layered story and sentences that crackle and pop, begging to be read aloud. Aria Aber’s splendid Good Girl introduces just such a voice ... The book’s not without wobbles, but Aber, an award-winning poet, strikes gold here ... A bildungsroman, gorgeously packed with Nila’s epiphanies on literature and philosophy, a tale of seductive risks and the burdens of diaspora.
Exhilarating ... It’s thrilling to see her turn major poetic gifts toward the sweep of this Künstlerroman, the story of a young woman becoming other than she used to be. While reading Good Girl, I thought of James Baldwin, writing in a letter that 'the place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.' With her novel, Aber has made the world more spacious: More people will find a place to fit.
Aber writes with the masterful precision of an archivist. Each scene is carefully documented, and the narrative maintains its forward momentum even when it is out of chronological order ... Repetitiveness can wear on the reader, but Aber manages to redeem it through the impeccable rhythm of her prose and her inspired choice of detail.
The novel is not driven by a forceful plot ... Aber constructs a vivid world in this novel, one that is tough and relentless; her Berlin feels grimy and smells terrible. She unwinds complex histories and legacies — of people, places and politics alike — with a deft touch. It can become tedious, though, to be trapped in the head of such an insistently self-destructive person
An ambitious, often beautiful, yet bloated debut set against the backdrop of Germany’s growing anti-immigrant sentiment, wrestles with the knot of Nila’s self-loathing without ever quite undoing it ... Captures the ache of Muslim girlhood and the vertigo of never feeling quite at home ... Aber is skilled at creating a charged sense of atmosphere and mood, but the novel tends to rehash the same narrative associations without deepening or complicating them ... Nila’s self-deprecation makes an unsatisfying substitute for enlightenment, and without the dynamism that could spring from the push and pull between two versions of the self, the story feels a little too much like the photos she takes: static ... Best read as a portrait of Berlin and the rise of its anti-immigrant sentiment as seen through the eyes of a grieving young Afghan woman. Aber conjures place with great specificity; her descriptions feel alive. But Good Girl is also stuffed with tropes of a certain kind of millennial novel.
The story she tells sounds like a howl of despair transposed into the key of poetic retrospection ... Aber’s writing thrums with the knowledge of lived experience ... A brooding, claustrophobic story of alienation and erotic obsession, but plotting in the traditional sense is not a priority for Aber. This is more a wallowing than a journey ... Waiting several hundred pages for Nila to catch on is first painful, then exasperating ... Not that Aber’s prose doesn’t cast a spell ... In both prose and verse, Aber touches the heart of a young woman struggling to find herself in the heat of clashing cultures.
Lush ... The story feels overstuffed with reflections on decorum, Islamic culture, and living authentically, and a hate-crime incident is treated like a minor speed bump. Yet readers will live viscerally through the vivid histrionics and adventures of obstinate and libidinous Nila as she tries to achieve her version of freedom.
Coming-of-age stories focused on a relationship with an older, ill-advised paramour are a time-honored tradition, but Marlowe’s red flags are so glaring from the outset that Nilab comes across as startlingly, almost doggedly naïve. Aber’s storytelling also often undercuts its own tensions ... Still, Aber’s vivid depiction of Berlin and the novel’s earnest wrestling with shame about desire and identity will be of interest to many readers. A debut still in the process of finding itself—like its young protagonist.
