Beyond the Blue Border by Dorit Linke
Translated by Elisabeth Lauffer
English edition published May 2021 via Charlesbridge Teen
★★★★
East Germany: Hanna isn't always good at flying under the radar, but she does basically what she's told. She is, if not a star swimmer, an extremely strong one; her marks are well enough that she expects to take the Abitur and go on to university; she knows that East Germany isn't all that the authorities say it is, but it's still where she lives and where she envisions her future.
Then all that changes—and Hanna can no longer see a confined-but-promising future. Instead, her future is grey, as is that of her best friend; their third wheel is long gone. And so it comes to pass that Hanna and Andreas pour themselves into the Baltic Sea to attempt the impossible: swimming to freedom.
The book is told in back-and-forth narration, then and now, until almost the very end. While I definitely found the swim more engaging—the odds are not in their favour, and there's built-in suspense regarding whether they will survive—it could make for quite a repetitive story if it the swim weren't broken up...and, more than that, the 'before' sections give some fascinating insight into life in East Germany. (Imagine being told by your parents not to eat the lettuce, because it's likely to come from contaminated ground near Chernobyl—and yet having that be the greens that the government buys to put in school lunchrooms.)
I could have done without quite so much of the dialogue being shouted or screamed, although I'm not sure if that was just a translation thing—I read the English translation, and possibly the German was not quite so screamy. All round entirely engaging, though.
