Feminist Coming-of-age Novel  A Summer That Never Ends

Dara Brexendorf chooses an unusual starting point for her debut novel: she introduces Ada, a young woman living with endometriosis, who traces the development of her physicality in her thoughts – intertwined with moments of joy, but also with great pain.

How do we remember the past, beauty, pain, first love? Dara Brexendorf’s debut novel Paradise Beach is concerned with this act of looking back, with remembering one’s adolescent body and with painful experiences during a long summer on the Baltic coast. These are Ada’s memories, as she spends many hot summer days and nights almost sleepless in her flat – in a state of stasis, triggered by the after-effects of endometriosis surgery.

Summer Joy and Profound Pain

Ada recalls what it was like back then, fifteen years ago, when she discovered her own physicality together with her cousin Lill – and, with it, the gaze from outside and the accompanying attempt to “improve” one’s body. The girls spend their days mainly lying on the summer beach on the Baltic Sea, watching other beachgoers and hanging out at the eponymous “Paradise Beach”, a chip stand on the seafront promenade.

That summer, thirteen-year-old Ada experiences a particular kind of physical pain for the first time. It is caused by her first menstrual bleeding and accompanies her from then on: “The bleeding doesn’t just happen. It is something that happens to her. Like a great misfortune that she cannot process.” She suppresses the pain, keeps it to herself, believes she must endure it and imposes on herself the demand “not to make such a fuss”. Later, the adult Ada compares her uterus to “a landscape”, like a beach with “purple algae settling on the dunes”, trying in this way to develop a new relationship with her body.

Understanding the Present Through the Past

Through memory, the protagonist places her former and present selves in relation to one another, without idealising the past. Much like the widely praised ZDFneo series Chabos, in which the protagonist Peppi, a typical millennial, reflects in the present on his youth in 2006, Paradise Beach also spans a trajectory that engages with the cultural and social codes of the 2000s, casting a critical eye on problematic structures such as, among others, the male gaze and the objectification of the female body.

Tender Sensation

Not least, Paradise Beach is a coming-of-age novel and a tender love story. Ada first meets Elja, who is the same age, at basketball training and later on the beach. Together they test boundaries, smoke weed and get drunk. In the process, Ada realises that she feels more for her new friend. She describes this unfamiliar, confusing feeling as a “shift”, an almost indefinable sensation. With Elja, Ada finds her personal “paradise”, feels understood and is fascinated by Elja’s carefree relationship with her own body.

The combination of poetic language, a focus on the body, memory and a critique of how female pain is treated makes Dara Brexendorf’s novel a striking work of contemporary feminist literature – a book that resonates long after reading.

April 2026