Reviewed by Darby Price
Every now and then, a novel comes along that is so authentic, so well-crafted and real, that I can’t stop thinking about it once I’ve read it. Alina Bronsky’s Broken Glass Park is one such book. Stunning and gritty, it balances the tough life of a teenager growing up in the wrong side of Berlin with overarching themes of love and redemption.
Bronsky’s protagonist is Sascha Naimann, an intelligent young woman who lives in Berlin's Russian ghetto, a neighborhood called "The Emerald." The world that Sascha inhabits is stark and full of unwelcome realities. Prospects are bleak for people her age: “Most of the people who live around here don’t have any dreams at all,” she says. “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.” Sascha does not immediately strike the reader as a dreamer, because she is world-wise and pragmatic; but she confesses that she has two dreams: “I want to kill Vadim. And I want to write a book about my mother.”
Vadim, the reader learns, is Sascha’s stepfather. Seen through her eyes, he is a stupid, self-centered chauvinist; a man who cannot understand the modern, poetic woman he married. By the time the book begins, he is incarcerated for the murder of Sascha’s mother.
Broken Glass Park details Sascha’s journey to understand her mother's choices. While Sascha sometimes describes her mother as stupid and emotional, she must also confront the fact that people are never what they seem at first, and that—intelligent as she is—she can still be wrong. The landscape Bronsky paints is urban, industrial, full of broken dreams and shabby high-rise apartment buildings where poor Russian emigrants settle. The people who live there seem at first to be one-sided: a smart-mouthed thuggish teen with gold chains and acne whom Sascha refers to as Peter the Great; a dumb, plump blonde named Angela who struggles with school but is “not completely idiotic, just in spurts”; a red-haired cripple named Oleg who plays chess and is a suspected pervert. As the book unfolds, however, everyone that Sascha thinks she knows reveals something surprising. Her wry, dismissive analysis of the world around her is challenged as she is forced to understand the very human natures of everyone, including Vadim.
What takes Sascha out of the Emerald at last is a chance meeting with a newspaper editor and, eventually, his son. The pair allow Sascha to escape to their house on the outskirts of Berlin for a little while, and it is here that she begins her rehabilitation from anger and outright hatred to confusion and, finally, understanding. In her relationship with these two men, Sascha makes surprising choices that are wholly authentic to her character. When Felix, the young man, declares his love for her, Sascha is unfazed. He’s a nice boy, and a relationship with him could easily mean permanent escape from a bleak and unsavory life—but Sascha is not her best friend, Anna, who dreams of marrying rich to escape the ghetto. Sascha is a strong, independent character if only because she is unflinchingly honest. By the end of the book, Sascha has made her escape from the Emerald in the only way that folds into her moral framework.
Bronsky's work is subtle, clear, and relevant to an American reader—even one who knows
nothing at all about Berlin and even less about a Russian ghetto in Berlin. The story's immediacy is developed through pop culture references; Sascha listens to Eminem, Dido, and Mary J. Blige, she watches
Cider House Rules and Brokeback Mountain. In one charmingly familiar scene,
Sascha and Felix have a deep conversation not by speaking, but by typing—even
though they are sitting right next to each other. Bronsky writes the coming-of-age narrative with refreshing honesty: the reader easily recognizes the thought processes of a teen, the
confusion and journey to understand oneself and the ways in which one is raised, and
even the defense mechanisms one uses—Sascha repeats the phrase “I do not cry”
several times throughout the story, which leads the reader to believe that she
would like very much to cry, if only she did not believe she must "stay tough" for her
younger siblings.
Broken Glass Park is a haunting, humane, and beautiful novel. Bronsky explores the theme of forgiveness with subtlety and grace, while exquisitely detailing the development of a young protagonist from adolescence to adulthood.
Darby Price is an MFA candidate in Poetry at George Mason University. She is a contributing writer for The Southeast Review and SER Online, and her poetry is forthcoming in Eclipse: A Literary Journal.