Almost Like a Fairy Tale

IT FEELS A BIT awkward to admit that I adored a novel that begins with a 14-year-old girl talking about burying her dead mother, yet that is the rather refreshing bit of magic German author Elena Fischer achieves in her 2023 debut, Paradise Garden. The coming-of-age story, newly available in Alexandra Roesch’s English-language translation, is particularly heartening these days because it involves a dark-skinned immigrant finding comfort and kinship within a majority white society via a series of compassionate strangers and acquaintances. As a cynic, I have a hard time believing such encounters still occur outside of fiction, but Fischer makes them develop so naturally that I questioned my own skepticism, yearning for the world she conjures.