Birgit Vanderbeke Sweet Sixteen S. Fischer Verlag, June 2005, 140 pp. ISBN 3-10-087026-3 Could it happen here? The premise of this engagingly satirical novel is the arrival of a new youth trend – the tendency of teenagers in various parts of Germany to disappear on their sixteenth birthday. When the first cases are reported the police are unconcerned. It is a commonplace that most runaways come back within a week or so. But with the high-profile disappearance of Justus Hanssen, son of popular TV presenter Conny Hanssen, followed by that of many others, they and the rest of the country change their tune. Conny herself advocates the removal of computers from children’s rooms and from schools. Parents start buying electronic tagging devices, and the newspapers discover a superannuated scapegoat in the person of a writer of anti-authoritarian children’s songs. Although at first kidnapping was suspected, the cause of the phenomenon gradually becomes clear: simply, the teenagers have had enough, and have decided to opt out of the lifestyle being offered to them by their parents’ generation. Before long a manifesto has appeared online which claims that parents can be divided into two groups: ‘Depressos’, who are hopelessly sentimental and live in the past, and ‘Repressos’, who are even worse and are only interested in work, shopping and watching television. All this is recounted with wry humour by the firstperson narrator, whose main source of information is her younger colleague Saskia and the latter’s very up-to-the-minute young brother Josha, whose sixteenth birthday is now approaching. When Josha fails to disappear on that date both Saskia and the narrator are almost disappointed. They realise that the Sweet Sixteen movement has become important to them, representing a protest against the type of repressive attitude demonstrated by the adults’ responses to it. This satire has bite and touches on topical issues: the exaggerations of the media and the issue of personal freedom versus public security, to name but two. And nearer home still there is the uncomfortable similarity between the ‘selectively accessible zones’ proposed by the security firms called in by the government and the ‘anti-social exclusion areas’ already existing in the UK today. This book will give its readers plenty to think about as well as to laugh at. Whose side should one be on?