Book review: Tiger Milk

TIGER Milk is made by mixing cheap Mariacron brandy and maracuja juice with milk from the school cafeteria in a wide-mouthed container of chocolate Müller milk. 

Stefanie Velasco

Head of Zeus, €11.99; ebook, €9.09

The chocolate milk is dumped down the toilet, but the innocent-looking container enables Nini and Jameelah to drink the cocktail while riding the U-Bahn towards Kurfurstenstrasse.

The alcohol gives them the courage they need to work as hookers, in their thigh-high striped stockings and skimpy T-shirts, posing on the street alongside the professionals.

The novel recounts the events of a hot, sticky Berlin summer that marks a watershed in the lives of its teenage protagonists, German-born Nini, and her best friend Jameelah, a refugee from Iraq, and their friends.

Nini is the narrator, but her story is dominated by the cleverer Jameelah. They live in tower blocks, and have been best friends since they met as small children at the playground. The third of their childhood gang is Amir, a gentle Bosnian boy from a troubled, often violent family.

These days, Nini tells us in her inimitable style, “Someone has drawn an invisible line through the middle of the playground and the German and Russian kids never go on the slide and the Arab and Bosnian kids never go on the swings.

Back when Jameelah and I rollerskated around the playground there wasn’t yet an invisible line.”

As Nini tells her story, the reader realises that first impressions, given by the street-walking incident, have been misleading.

The girls are younger than they seem, 14 , nearly 15, and far less tough: they are bright kids, still at school, just going a little wild, experimenting, or as they put it “practising”, so that later on, when real life begins, they will know how it all works and nobody will be able to mess with them.

You realise how young they are when Nini mentions that the highlight of her summer will be a stay in the children’s hospital to have her wisdom teeth out.

Jameelah’s mother was widowed and lost her only son in the Iraqi war, and works hard as a nurse, living in hope of receiving German naturalisation papers for herself and Jameelah.

Nini’s mother spends her days lying on a sofa, apparently in a depression, not noticing that her younger daughter, Nini’s half-sister, is raiding the drinks cabinet, a fact that also escapes her partner, pony-tailed taxi-driver Rainer.

What reads like an unusual coming-of-age novel takes on another dimension when Amir’s sister, who has been seeing a man her family does not approve of, is murdered.

The killing takes place at midnight in the playground, and Nini and Jameelah, who are hidden, witness the murder, and know the identity of her killer.

German Nini immediately says they must go to the police, but Iraqi-born Jameelah, who instinctively understands the inevitability of the honour killing, forbids her to do so.

The rift worsens when their friend Amir is imprisoned for the crime, which they know he did not commit.

The murder and its aftermath give shape to the novel, but what keeps you reading is the author’s insight into the minds of this lively gang of teenagers, and Nini’s wry, philosophical asides.

Stefanie de Velasco captures their bravado, and the vulnerability it masks, and the translation by Tim Mohr reads most convincingly.

Scenes at the outdoor pool, with the smell of chlorine, the girls shrieking, and the suntanned boys doing cannonballs, are especially evocative.

The highs and lows of the hot Berlin summer will resonate with anyone who has ever been a rebellious or lovesick teenager, no matter where.