There are no big police chases (except for one involving a bicycle) and none of the more obvious rites of passage. Until the road trip.įor much of the time, little happens.
They arrive in a beaten-up old Lada that Tschick sometimes uses, borrowing it without permission from the street but always bringing it back. Tschick – the new Russian kid at school, who sometimes turns up reeking of booze – insists that they drive to Tatiana's house and give her the reconstituted gift. He has done an amazing pencil drawing of Beyoncé for her but ends up tearing it to pieces. Mike's crazy about Tatiana, a girl in his class, but is one of the few classmates who doesn't get invited to her party. At home, he has to deal with an alcoholic mother and a father who appears to be having a rather obvious affair. At school he is aloof and seemingly disconnected. From the outset, it is clear that Mike is a square peg in a round hole. The story seems a simple one – two 14-year-olds sort of borrow a car – but the execution is beautiful. Its American stoops and faucets and pants for trousers mixed with euros and kilometres-an-hour make for an interesting hybrid. Tim Mohr has done an excellent job with Why We Took the Car. Fellow German Cornelia Funke aside, I am hard-pressed to think of other contemporary foreign children's authors available in English (though I know the Pushkin imprint is trying to redress this). The lack of translated children's (in this case Young Adult) fiction is our loss. I have been irregularly reviewing children's books for the Guardian for more than 10 years and, if memory serves – with the exception of Tove Jansson's Moomin books – this is the first book I've read in translation for review.
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