Why We Took the Car, by Wolfgang Herrdorf

Why We Took the Car, by Wolfgang Herrndorf

At Kirkus this week, I wrote about Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Why We Took the Car:

The dialogue—and I’m sure that the translator, Tim Mohr, deserves a lot of the credit for this—is FANTASTIC. It’s so authentic that it reads like a transcription of a conversation between 14-year-old boys: They banter, they argue, they digress, they joke, they show off; they are at moments awkward, silly, serious, wise. It’s a story about a boy from a broken family that pretends everything is fine. It’s a story about loneliness and abandonment. It’s a story about friendship, about kindness, about empathy, about confidence, about trust, about hope.