“An autistic psychopath is the human being who is most fundamentally himself. He cannot be anything but original and spontaneous. He is uninhibited by the collective social will.”
The Matchbox Girl is a story based on true events in Austria 🇦🇹 during the Second World War. Our protagonist, Adelheid, has been placed in a specialist paediatric clinic 🏥 for children with a range of mental illnesses.
Adelheid tells her story as she lives it 📝. At times it feels chaotic and random, yet she makes meticulous notes about everything that happens around her—sometimes to the detriment of those sharing her world 😬. She follows the rules carefully and does exactly as she’s instructed, until she begins to realise 🤔 that maybe she needs to follow her own rules instead.
I initially found The Matchbox Girl difficult to read—not because of the subject matter, but because of the haphazard use of capital letters 😕. This felt like a deliberate stylistic choice, intended to reflect Adelheid’s fragmented mind, but it soon became normal and I stopped noticing it altogether 🙂
I particularly enjoyed reading about Dr A (Dr Asperger) 🧠 and the early identification of the disorder. While much of this book makes for unhappy and uncomfortable reading 💔, I think it’s essential that we understand what happened in our past—and why it still matters today.
Thank you to Bloomsbury Publishing for the gifted copy of The Matchbox Girl by Alice Jolly.
About the Book
From the multi-award-winning author - a beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel telling the story of a young girl's battle for survival and search for the truth in occupied Vienna
Adelheid Brunner does not speak. She writes and draws instead and her ambition is to own one thousand matchboxes. Her grandmother cannot make sense of this, but Adelheid will stop at nothing to achieve her dream. She makes herself invisible, hiding in cupboards with her pet rat, Franz Joseph, listening in on conversations she can't fully comprehend.
Then she meets Dr Asperger, a man who lets children play all day and who recognises the importance of matchboxes. He invites Adelheid to come and live at the Vienna paediatric clinic, where she and other children like herself will live under observation.
But the date is 1938 and the place is Vienna – a city of political instability, a place of increasing fear and violence. When the Nazis march into the city, a new world is created and difficult choices must be made.
Why are the clinic's children disappearing, and where do they go? Adelheid starts to suspect that some of Dr Asperger's games are played for the highest stakes. In order to survive, she must play a game whose rules she cannot yet understand.
Triumphant and tragic, soulful and spirited, The Matchbox Girl is a burningly brilliant book – that brings the stories of a generation of lost children into the light.
About Alice
Alice Jolly is a novelist and playwright. She published a memoir in 2015 called Dead Babies and Seaside Towns, which won the Pen Ackerley Prize, and one of her short stories won the 2014 V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize, awarded by The Royal Society of Literature. She has also published two novels with Simon and Schuster and four of her plays have been produced by the professional company of the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham. She teaches creative writing on the Mst at Oxford University.
Her novel Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile was published by Unbound in June 2018. It was a Walter Scott Prize recommended novel for 2109, was on the longlist for the Ondaatje Prize awarded by the Royal Society of Literature and was runner up for the £30,000 Rathbones Folio Prize. Her novel Between the Regions of Kindness was published by Unbound in April 2019. In 2021 she was received an O. Henry Award for her short story ‘From Far Around They Saw Us Burn.’ She published a short story collection with Unbound in March 2023 entitled From Far Around They Saw Us Burn.
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