Almost Like a Fairy Tale

Cory Oldweiler reviews German author Elena Fischer’s debut novel “Paradise Garden,” newly translated by Alexandra Roesch.

By Cory OldweilerAugust 28, 2025

• Fiction

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.

I should qualify that yearning by saying the world she conjures in the latter half of the novel, because Paradise Garden can be, especially early on, extremely painful and bleak, a portrait of a life no one should have to live. The story opens with teenager Billie recalling her last months with her mother Marika, whose foreshadowed death will arrive about one-third of the way through. When we meet Billie, she knows absolutely nothing about her father, not even whether he, like her mother, is Hungarian. And whenever she tries to broach the subject, her mom swiftly puts an end to the discussion. We never learn why Marika fled to Germany specifically, but we do know that, despite striving to become nearly fluent in German, her Romani blood means she will always stick out, though her skin is not as dark as her mother’s. Billie’s skin is lighter still, as if betraying the fading influence of her roots, similar to the way no one calls her by her given name, Erzsébet.

No one, that is, until her 60-year-old grandma arrives from Hungary to take advantage of the superior German healthcare system, and in doing so scuttles Marika and Billie’s summer holiday on the beaches of France, an extravagance made conceivable only after they win a radio call-in contest. Under normal circumstances, mother and daughter live paycheck to paycheck, like most of those in their housing block on the outskirts of a (seemingly southern) German city. Fischer captures the deprivations of this life though an agglomeration of precise details. The five buildings are surrounded by a “scrap graveyard” where residents dumped “everything they no longer wanted.” At the end of each month, money is so tight that Billie and her mother are limited to eating spaghetti with ketchup (a meal, incidentally, that I vividly recall encountering for the first time in Budapest in the fall of 1998, when two friends and I wandered exhausted into the only open restaurant we could find, an unremarkable spot that also used the condiment as a pizza topping). The tower block address is so notorious that it could end a job interview as soon as it is mentioned, and yet Marika manages to hold down two jobs: one as a cocktail waitress, the other as an office cleaner. The former requires her to do whatever she can to draw attention to herself, while she has worked at the latter so long that she has become invisible: “They’d got used to her over the years, like a filing cabinet or a lamp.”

The once-in-a-lifetime element of the planned vacation makes her grandma’s timing all the more painful for Billie, as does the fact that her grandma takes over her bedroom, forcing the girl to share her mother’s air mattress in the living room while she worries that the few possessions still stored in her room “would probably smell weird for years.” Grandma and her Magyar pride allow Fischer an effective vehicle through which to explore the outsider nature of Billie and Marika’s life, from their neighbors on the housing block’s 17th floor—a Palestinian who came to Germany to study chemistry, a wannabe actress who struggles with mental illness, and a woman whose lecherous husband beats her—to Billie’s German best friend, Lea, whose life in a three-story house with a huge swimming pool and a father who drives a Mercedes-Benz to and from his bank job is “the Hollywood version of” Billie’s own. Fischer sets up a subtle three-tiered hierarchy that jibes with the three-act structure of her story. At the bottom is the housing block, where everyday life competes with the nearby autobahn—“the roaring of the cars was always there.” In the middle of the novel, Billie succumbs to the allure of the open road before ultimately finding contentment in nature, which she sees as the most powerful entity because “the forest swallowed the sound of the autobahn.”

Fischer has an astute facility with dialogue, demonstrated most purely for me by the genuine, blink-and-you-miss-it start of a conversation between Billie and her neighbor Luna, where both characters emerge out of the fog of comfortable complacency:

“Billie?” Luna asked now.

“Luna?”

The author is also confident enough to let her story speak for itself, and so Roesch’s well-crafted translation rarely needs to become flashy. The reliance on clean, simple sentences—even Marika’s shocking death is laid out in a few brutal, declarative statements of fact—means that any run-on or cluster of clauses sticks out, such as when Marika describes to Billie how her mother used to hit her: “I heard the slap of a hand against a cheek, I saw a wooden spoon break on impact with a shoulder, I saw red marks on my mother’s thighs. It felt like an iron fist had clenched around my heart.”

Once Billie is orphaned, the novel flirts with a conventional arc, with the girl briefly ending up in a children’s home before returning temporarily to the housing block and her grandma. Back home, Billie discovers a box of mementos her mom had hidden and, bolstered by some additional background gleaned from conversations with her grandma, runs away toward the North Sea in search of her father. I would have loved the children’s home section to have been developed a bit more, simply because Marlene, with whom Billie shares a room, is an intriguing character who ultimately doesn’t get much to do.

Before Billie heads out on the road, a social worker gives her some sage advice: “When we lose someone we love, we sometimes don’t know who we are for a while.” Not many 14-year-olds know who they are under the best of circumstances, but Billie is forced to find out, and at far too young an age. The novel’s affecting and almost winsome concluding arc gives her a safe place to do that learning alongside people who help her rather than seek to do her further harm—all of which makes Paradise Garden feel almost like a fairy tale. In a world where the very concept of paradise fades further and further into fantasy every day, Fischer’s relatively happy ending is truly welcome.