Young Adult Novel about Moving and a Fresh Start  Happy Ending in Mannheim

Lou absolutely does not want to move from Hamburg to Mannheim. How is she even supposed to live there? But then she meets Lady Freya in her crazy palace of shards, as well as Sari, her new best friend, and Tikey, who she takes an instant liking to. And all at once, quite a lot begins to speak in favour of the city on the Neckar.

“It began with shards. I knew straight away that someone had died when my parents wrapped me in cotton wool with their looks before they even started speaking. But it never occurred to me that it was my life that was shattering.” Lou is horrified: the family is moving away from Hamburg because her mother, an actress, has accepted a theatre engagement in Mannheim – “crap Mannheim”, as her daughter soon calls her new home. In angry exchanges with her parents, she behaves like a complete drama queen. How can she live without her best friend Nel? Without her theatre group and her role as Titania in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream? And what will become of her love for Damian, who plays Oberon?

Annette Mierswa, an award-winning author – best known for her children’s book Lola auf der Erbse (Lola on the Pea, 2008) – and an experienced theatre educator, develops her young adult novel Der Scherbenpalast (The Palace of Shards) like a turbulent improvisation. Lou, as the protagonist, stages her own drama here with unusual cheek and directness. She draws the reader into the story because she is so typical of adolescent moods, yet rarely portrayed this bluntly.

Lady Freya and a Queen of Social Blunders

An important supporting character alongside her parents, whom Lou tries to blackmail into dropping their relocation plans by keeping silent, is Lady Freya: an elderly woman in Mannheim with a rather peculiar eccentricity. Then there is Sari, a pupil at Lou’s new grammar school, who calls herself the “queen of social blunders”, and the fascinating boy Tikey, whom she meets at Freya’s – a guitar player and environmental activist.

As soon as they move into their villa in Mannheim, Lou turns her music system up so loud that the neighbours are shocked. Only Freya, sitting in the neighbouring garden in front of a strikingly decorated house known as the “Palace of Shards”, smiles at her. She recognises her younger self in the rebellious teenager. With her – an older lady in colourful, flamboyant clothes – Lou is allowed to be wild, as wild as the garden, where rare flowers and plants grow alongside a giant sequoia.

Through conversations about their esoteric meaning and effect, and through working in the garden itself, the two soon grow closer. Freya explains to Lou why she repeatedly smashes porcelain and hurls it against the walls of her house, which was destroyed in a fire, using mortar to fix the pieces in place. It helps her deal with her anger – and she has been angry ever since her partner left her many years ago to join an American environmental campaign to protect the giant sequoias.

A Wonderful Oberon

At this point, the fictional narrative is interrupted by the biography of environmental activist Julia “Butterfly” Hill, who lived for two years in 1997 on a giant sequoia on the coast of Northern California to prevent it from being cut down. The author uses this motif to help her heroine reach a decision – and her happy ending. Has she found her purpose here? Does she really want to return to Hamburg?

After all, back there only Nel remains from her old circle of friends. And then her new friend Sari even gets her a role as an extra at the Mannheim National Theatre. After intense emotional turmoil, Lou manages to piece the shards of her life back together. She stages her very own A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Mannheim – and of course Tikey is her wonderful Oberon.

May 2026