Dare I say, flop? Started out great. I’m not opposed to toxic relationships in and of themselves, and I find reading about them to be really compelling and interesting. But this just got worse and worse for worse and worse’s sake. If a book is going to be troubling, at least do it for a reason. And I see what was supposed to be happening (communist dreams lost, the infiltration of the emptiness of capitalism, fall of East Berlin, I get it) but it didn’t dig any deeper than sheer awful-ness. Also, I don’t know if this is a translation thing or perhaps a German rhetoric thing, but I couldn’t figure out WHAT this girl was saying half the time. Twisty sentence fragments, interjecting historical monologues, references to clipped phrases with no (grammatical) resolution. So sad about this because on paper this is such a me book.