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Review: The Storyteller by Antonia Michaelis

I normally know exactly how I feel about a book once I've read it; either I like it or I don't. This book however has left me so conflicted. I could not stop reading it, but it was also so dark, bleak and at times disturbing that I didn't want to be. The story is of a girl named Anna, who descibes herself as living in a soap bubble. She encounters and begins to get to know a boy at her school named Abel, known as the "Polish Peddler", since he sells drugs. Besides being a drug dealer, he is also the older brother of a little girl named Micha, to whom he is a parental figure and a story teller. The big fairy tale that he tells Micha (and Anna) throughout the book parallels the real life happenings in their lives. The themes of the book are similar to the setting in which the story takes place: cold, dark, almost uncomfortable. Almost excessively so. The characters themselves, in my opinion, are quite ambiguous, in the sense that you can't even really tel