In Berlin's artistic underground, where drugs and techno 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 refugees, 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 night life, Nila meets Marlowe, an American writer whose fading literary celebrity opens her eyes to a life of personal and artistic freedom. 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's stops to ask herself the most important question: who does she want to be?
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.
