The Matchbox Girl by Alice Jolly

 This is an important, powerful book based on exhaustive research. It’s narrated through the eyes of a mute neuro-divergent girl kept in a secure children’s hospital in 1930s Vienna, which, like today, is a time of great political upheaval. ‘Important Facts’ are recorded by Adelheid Brunner in her notebooks, but ‘the Facts are most Unruly’ and are twisted and distorted by those who live between what she calls the Red Terror and the Brown Terror. There is too much misinformation and disinformation, and just believing something can make you a criminal. The only truth Adelheid knows is what she sees and hears and she records it all. She wants to be ‘Properly Informed’, but is aware that she is not Appropriate. That, she writes ‘is a club for which they never tell you the Rules and therefore you cannot join.’

Adelheid is one of the children being studied by Dr Asperger as part of his research into ‘autistic-psychopathy’. His research is now tainted by his association with the Nazis, but Adelheid records Important Facts that reveal a complex political situation. Survival depended on being on the right side of politics. Her own grandfather has disappeared, officially dead, but she knows that that is an untruth, because, as a socialist journalist, his life was in immediate danger. 

It was so real I couldn’t put it down. I was moved and angered and disgusted in turn. I was caught up in the dilemmas of the characters and wanted to know their fates, horribly fascinated by the slide of good people into terrible deeds in almost imperceptible increments. 

This is a story that needed to be told. It addresses how to navigate difficult questions of morality and ethics in dangerous times. It challenges moral concepts, the way we process information, how we deal out humanity to other human beings. And it asks big questions that need honest answers. When should we speak and when should we stay silent? How would we ourselves behave when confronted with those impossible choices? Who would we save when the bombs started to fall? This is a book for Now. 

The Matchbox Girl by Alice Jolly is published by Bloomsbury