Home Feed
Home
Search
Search
Add Review, Blurb, Quote
Add
Activity
Activity
Profile
Profile
1,000 Coils of Fear
1,000 Coils of Fear: A Novel | Olivia Wenzel
1 post | 2 read | 3 to read
A multilayered and rhythmic debut novel about her life as a Black German woman living in Berlin and New York during the chaos of the 2016 U.S. presidential election from playwright Olivia Wenzel. A young woman attends a play about the fall of the Berlin Wall—and realizes she is the only Black person in the audience. She and her boyfriend are hanging out by a lake outside Berlin—and four neo-Nazis show up. In New York, she is having sex with a stranger on the night of the 2016 presidential election—and wakes up to panicked texts from her friends in Germany about Donald Trump’s unlikely victory. Engaging in a witty Q&A with herself—or is it her alter ego?—she takes stock of our rapidly changing times, sometimes angry, sometimes amused, sometimes afraid, and always passionate. And she tells the story of her family: Her mother, a punk in former East Germany who never had the freedom she dreamed of. Her Angolan father, who returned to his home country before she was born to start a second family. Her grandmother, whose life of obedience to party principles brought her prosperity and security but not happiness. And her twin brother, who took his own life at the age of nineteen. Heart-rending, opinionated, and wry, Olivia Wenzel’s remarkable debut novel is a clear-sighted and polyphonic investigation into origins and belonging, the roles society wants to force us into and why we need to resist them, and the freedoms and fears that being the odd one out brings.
Amazon Indiebound Barnes and Noble WorldCat Goodreads LibraryThing
Pick icon
100%
review
RidgewayGirl
post image
Pickpick

A woman in Berlin lives her life. She's both Black and German and the weight of needing to be constantly alert and of living with everyday racism is stretching her to her breaking point. She struggles to find a way to be in the world as she thinks about her past, her brother's suicide and her mother's life as a single mother to Black children in the DDR. Told in a fragmented series of vignettes, this novel functions far better than I expected.

BarbaraBB It sounds very good. And important 1y
19 likes1 stack add1 comment