After torturous years at the university studying Art History, Judith has found a tentative peace with her husband Klaus, and her two sons, Uli and Kilian.
Klaus Rapp, a doctoral student in Engineering, who had lived in the same building as hers on Stuttgart’s east side, a working class and industrial part of town, often invited Judith and tried to connect with her.
He moved out after completing his doctorate, and Judith continued her semi-abusive relationship with a macho medical student named Sören and her slide into ever more severe depression and anxiety.
At the end of the Gymnasium, she fell in love with Simon, a tall, good-looking only son of a working class single mother.
The next morning, Judith notices that the garden downstairs, in front of Posselt's living room, is littered with the remains of firecrackers, and that their window is smeared with mustard, toothpaste, and cracked eggs.
Eino took good care of little Marco, taught him a number of things, and shared his plans with him to go back to the coast in Estonia one day.
After a long-planned birthday party for one of her friends in nearby Tübingen, Leonie is hung over having resisted at the last minute an almost-affair with a married man.
Judith witnesses how Hanna’s son Mattis has one of his health breakdowns in their street, and is forced to give them a ride to the children’s hospital.
Finally, a robbery combined with arson at Nâzım’s store shakes Leonie, Judith, and the Posselt’s upscale Stuttgart neighborhood.
For the structure of her novel, Anna Katharina Hahn relies on a series of chapters written in free indirect discourse from the perspective of multiple characters.
For Judith, her sons Uli and Kilian are clearly a means for self-affirmation; towards the end of the novel, we see that she has never really left her dysfunctional life on Stuttgart's east side, dependent on tranquilizers, behind.
The category of gender reveals a structural singularity: the only "masculine" narrative perspective belongs to Marco, an adolescent who has not yet turned 13.
Ursula März wrote in the German weekly Die Zeit[5] about how impressed she was by Hahn's representation of the immense psychic and social internal pressures that the protagonists' frantic quests for identity create.
Jürgen Becker, in the German daily Die Tageszeitung (taz), admired Hahn's confident style, as well as the rigorous illumination of the world of her main characters, i.e. Leonie and Judith.