Cornelia Travnicek – Junge Hunde

A novel on late adolescence and self-finding, set on a mixture of stages ranging from Vienna, its Hinterland, to China. The recent book of the Viennese young writer Cornelia Travnicek (official page, WikiPedia) tells a complicated story about finding and loosing your parents.

The main actors, Johanna, always helpful and supportive of those around here, and Ernst, a Chinese adoptive son in Austria, are good friends since early childhood. He sets out to find his parents in China, while she has to deal with profound change in her own world while worrying about his travel and distance.

Although in principle a nice and interesting story, I felt that the book is at times weighting too much on sentiments, second hand sentiments, and trying to extend the story. By itself this wouldn’t be a problem if the language would be of a great story teller, but in this case it just extends and gave me hard time continue reading. The surprising ending isn’t that surprising, a single line 2/3 through the book just let it slip so that it is clear who is the father.

All in all not a bad book, but I wouldn’t recommend it from the depth of my heart. Still, as Viennese I felt a bit nostalgic with parts of dialect appearing in the book.