Maybe things would have turned out differently if Nova hadn't found the picture in her sleeping little brother's bed, painted by him: a human torso with tentacles in place of arms and legs, with rags of brown skin hanging out of the blood-soaked mouth of the monster whose black, round glasses makes it clear who has been portrayed here.

Marcus, the father of her brother Cosmos.

Nova's stepfather.

Her mother's tormentor.

Definitely not just hers.

Fridtjof Küchemann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Hardly more than a few weeks have passed since the three of them escaped to the new apartment at the beginning of Chantal-Fleur Sandjon's young adult novel "The Sun, So Bright and Black".

The arm that Nova had held in front of her mother to protect her head from being hit by her stepfather with a chair was still in a cast.

Doctors call this typical fracture a parrying fracture, Nova learned and kept it to herself for too long.

poetics of feelings

Then Marcus is suddenly standing in front of Nova's school again.

Shortly thereafter, her mother, on the phone with the police, drops her last complaint against Marcus.

Finally he is back at the kitchen table – “To a fresh start!” – and is even allowed to stay the night, and little Cosmos, who has just had his last day of kindergarten behind him, asks his seventeen-year-old sister if he can sleep with her can.

How the mother of the two tries to get back on her feet in the new apartment after fleeing to the women's shelter, Chantal-Fleur Sandjon lets her narrator see with great love, some worries and growing alienation: As a single, unemployed black mother of With two children she would hardly have found a new home in Berlin.

Luckily, a friend lets her move into her recently deceased father's apartment. According to the doorbell, the four of them now live there as a rainbow family.

The mother drinks.

Her powers are strong enough to take a new job as a cook at Cosmos' old kindergarten, but they are not strong enough to keep Marcus out of her life permanently.

How Nova, who had just saved her mother, decides

The whole book is in verse, every one or two pages divided into individual poems with headings.

Sometimes the lines follow the breath of breathless narration, occasionally they reach out into the poetic, rhymes are rarely found.

And again and again, words break out of the flow of lines, they become a staircase, an abyss, a spiral in the sentence on the book page, once - when Marcus unexpectedly meets up in front of the school - they stand upside down for a few pages.

It is a seventeen-year-old who captures her experience, her life in this way, sometimes in a documentary note, sometimes with an image that occasionally, as it does not only happen with young people, tips into the flowery or into the pathetic: You believe this nova in everything of their words, every feeling and every confession.

And "The sun