How Madness Explained the World to Me
Wie der Wahnsinn mir die Welt erklärte

Zipfel Cover
Hanser Verlag
July 2019 / 194pp
Children’s & Young Adults’

This book is outside of the five-year window for guaranteed assistance with English language translation. We suggest getting in touch with the relevant funding body for an informal conversation about the possibility of support. Please refer to to our  recommendations page for books that are currently covered by our funding guarantee.

review

Dita Zipfel’s YA debut is a coming-of-age story exploring current and challenging themes that are hot topics for a young teen readership.

How Madness Explained the World to Me is narrated from the perspective of the nearly thirteen-year-old Lucie and offers witty and often cynical insights into her adolescent awakening, while examining the diversity of contemporary family arrangements. The book uses humorous cartoon illustrations by Rán Flygenring throughout to support the storytelling. Lucie lives with her younger brother, Jannis, and with her mother, who has had a number of what Lucie deems to be unsuitable live-in partners of both genders. She is acutely aware that she is not one of the in-crowd, has still not started her periods and doesn’t yet have breasts. Lucie wants to visit her mother’s ex-girlfriend in Berlin for various reasons, not least because of her mother’s new live-in boyfriend, Michi. She needs money to pay for her train ticket and thinks she has hit the jackpot when she finds an advert on a supermarket board for an overpaid dog walker.

Lucie soon discovers that there is no dog and that the strange and crazy man who posted the advert is actually looking for a ghost writer for his weird cookbook of recipes with magical properties. She doesn’t believe that the man really has discovered magic recipes but she uses one anyway to create a love potion for Marvin, a boy in the school year above, who the girls swoon over. It transpires that Marvin is not to be trusted: he tricks his way into Lucie’s home, copies a family photo of her younger brother dressed in a ballet outfit, adds homophobic references and posts it online for all to see. Lucie works with Leo, a friend of Marvin’s, to seek revenge and ensure that Marvin gets his comeuppance for this and other misdemeanours.

Reminiscent of the popular Tracy Beaker books by Jacqueline Wilson, How Madness Explained the World to Me profiles a protagonist from a relatively unconventional background, working through her early adolescence. Lucie’s story engages with many themes relevant to young people today, including bullying and cyber-bullying, self-image, veganism, bereavement, homophobia, gender-stereotyping and mental health. This compelling novel is a sharp and entertaining take on growing up in the twenty-first century

about the author

Dita Zipfel was born in 1981 and lives with her family in the smallest castle in southern France and in the biggest broom closet in Northern Germany. She writes plays and screenplays. Her YA debut Wie der Wahnsinn mir die Welt erklärte was awarded the Hamburg Advancement Award for Literature.

rights information

Carl Hanser Verlag

Contact: Anne Brans

anne.brans@hanser.de

Tel: +49 (0)89 99830 519

www.hanser-literaturverlage.de

translation assistance

Applications should be made to the Goethe-Institut.

share this recommendation

Share this on twitter, facebook or via mail.

All recommendations from Autumn 2019