Good Girl ~ Aria Aber : A post-reflection

Nila is barely into her twenties when we meet her, wandering through the underbelly of Berlin, trying to stitch herself into womanhood under the glow of its flickering city lights. Berlin becomes her shelter, a place to slip into someone else,  someone easier to carry. Beneath the surface, though, lies the heavy undercurrent of immigration, race, and identity; burdens she bears quietly as we follow her through the winding alleys of a city that both accepts and alienates.

She walks among other young souls like herself - fragile, proud, aching. They carry their names like wounds, their shame like second skin, and yet still look for the promise of snow the next morning - a clean start, a gentler day.

In the shadows of her grief - the loss of her mother, the aching absence of guidance, Nila turns to an over-the-hill American author. Their relationship, turbulent and raw, holds her like a storm for much of the novel. It is in his reflection that she begins to see fragments of herself -first distorted, then clearly. She rebels, unravels, and pieces herself back together.

There is a quiet crescendo when Nila, cornered into truth, reveals she is Afghan. For years, she let people assume - Greek, Italian, anything else, anything that might explain her beautiful brown hair without forcing her to explain her history. But when she finally speaks her truth, she finally feels free. There's a softness in her honesty, a strength in her vulnerability.

Eli, her first friend and first love, carries a similar thread of displacement. From a Kosovo-Albanian background, he too has lied, in his childhood, about who he is - a quiet survival tactic. In a delicate, glassy Berlin morning, he too confesses. It is in that shared unburdening that the book blooms most tenderly.

As the novel drifts through Berlin - its buildings, street corners, it’s strange intimacy and aching solitude, I kept thinking of the film The Brutalist. Not for its plot, but for the atmosphere: the restraint, the raw simplicity, the loneliness of otherness. The way foreign cities sometimes become silent mirrors of our inner lives.

This book made me pause and think deeply about inheritance, how much of our parents live inside us. We may try to feel otherwise, to be otherwise - rational, modern, untethered. But somewhere along the way, when our gaze softens and our defenses fall, we recognize that part of ourselves that once tried to run - now it gently returns to understand. To forgive. To carry forward.

And that’s when we begin to write our own chapters. To become our own distributaries, carrying water from old rivers, but flowing towards new seas.

Aria Aber writes with a heart that has emptied itself fully into these pages. There’s nothing held back. And somehow, you know as you read that something in her will fill again, just enough, to float once more on her Nilab (the Afghan name for the Indus, revealed tenderly at the end).

She writes of longing, of a woman torn between past and present, of a soul who just wants to be free. But she also knows and shows us that there is no perfect freedom. Just moments of honesty, of release, of clarity. And those are enough.

In the book’s final breaths, Nila looks ahead. Her father’s old dreams finally feel reachable. She has gathered her past and laid it gently beside her. Now, she can walk her own path not away from her past, but with it.

Good Girl is a mirror — sometimes warm, sometimes unflinching. You will see your ambition in it. Your buried shame. Your quiet beauty. Your crushed ugly self. Your demons. Your bitterness. Your goodness. Your kindness. Your abilities. And slowly, you will see yourself whole. It never once feels like a debut novel.

Thank you, Aria, for writing this for girls like me — girls still learning how to come of age, even in their forties. Because maybe coming of age isn’t about time. It’s about tenderness. It’s about turning inward and learning how to flow again.