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Title: Ali zum Dessert: Leben in einer neuen Welt (translation: Ali for dessert: Living in a different world)
Author: Hatice Akyün
Language: German
Number of Pages: 223
Genre: autobiography
Book Number/Goal: 1/12

Rating: 4/5

Review: Very funnily written autobiography about the life of a Turkish woman raised in Germany. Between hilarious annecdotes about her Turkish family and Geman friends the author describes the reality of living with a foreign heritage in Germany, the contradictions between the society she grew in and the values her parents tried to give her. It is a romantic commedy in a way: her parents are pressuring her to marry and she has decided she won't marry a Turkish man no matter what. While telling the reader about the havoc that is her life, she manages to describe rather accurately the prejudices and cultural differences between Germans and the Turkish minority and how they shaped her life and her thoughts.

She acknowledges her own miss-conceptions and tries to show how both cultures can coexist at the same time, how she can be Turkish and German; be a part of both worlds without having to choose one or the other as people assume she should do. I enjoyed the book and laughed a lot with it, too. At times, it was as if she was describing my own life. All in all a very nice reading with a refreshing approach to the cultural-shock one experiments when living in and embracing two different cultures at them same time.