About book Die äußerst Seltsame Familie Battersby (2013)
Fourteen year old Ralph Stevens escapes his humdrum life when he's invited to spend the summer with his British cousins, ostensibly to set up their wireless network. What he discovers is a family given to eccentricity, from boisterous Cecil to solemn Beatrice and would be princess Daphne. Things get seriously weird when their infamous aunt fairy godmother Chessie of Cheshire turns up, ready to grant each child a wish. From that point on, it's pure chaos: Cecil's wish becomes a twisted satire of fairy tale quests and politics invoking the spirits of Terry Pratchett and Monty Python; Daphne's tears apart the classic fairy tale, "The Snow Queen;" and Beatrice's wish takes Ralph into the land of the dead Well, more like a 2.5, really, since I did muddle though it after all. But the sheer absurdity of the execution just left me cold. I almost felt as though the author was so enamored of his conceit of creating a narratively jerky, post-modern young adult fantasy novel and then lampshading the jerkiness and its failure that he either failed to notice or ignore the fact that pointing out the problems with the book do not fix them. The storytelling was uneven, neither of the main characters were particularly relatable and the way the story was framed just left me...on the outside. I could not get into this story and for all its (self) referentiality and in-jokes, I remained unimpressed.
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