Review of The Matchbox Girl by Alice Jolly – Horror, Humanity and Dr. Asperger | imaginary

AWhen I started reading Alice Jolly’s new novel, which tells the story of a mute, autistic girl living in wartime Vienna, I realized that I was resisting its very premise. I’m generally skeptical of books that use children’s narrators to add poignancy to dark plots, or novels that use Nazism as a way to introduce moral danger into their characters’ journeys. However, in the end, Julie won me over. This is a book that walks a tightrope between emotion and honesty, between realism and fantasy, and creates something vivid and memorable while doing so.

We meet our fierce narrator, Adelheid Brunner, when she is brought to a children’s hospital by her grandmother, who cannot handle the little girl’s obsession. Adelheid is obsessed with the matchboxes of the title, which she constantly studies, orders, and sometimes throws away. At the hospital, she finds that she and her fellow child prisoners are the subjects of obsessive study by their doctors—sometimes understood, sometimes appreciated, and then, tragically, sometimes ignored.

Adelheid sees how certain disabilities arouse special interest from one of the main doctors, Dr. A, who piques his interest in children whom he calls his “little teachers.” This, we understand, is Dr. Hans Asperger, whose research at the Vienna Children’s Hospital in the 1930s laid the foundation for understanding autism.

Adelheid discovers how she needs to present herself in order to thrive in this milieu: to show that she is valuable and should not be discarded. “One can wear the coat of life,” she realized, “and perhaps change into another when the need arises.” She is able to leave the hospital for a time, and witness the rise of Nazism from her position as a waitress in her grandmother’s crowded café, only to return as a ward assistant during the dark years of World War II.

While the narrative is very impressionistic at times, it is clear that Jolie is trying to adhere to the historical reality of this hospital. This was indeed where staff carefully monitored their patients, but it was also where decisions were made, during the war, to send many of them to another clinic, where they were subjected to medical experiments or killed.

I’m no expert on this harsh corner of history, but it recently piqued my interest after reading Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger. Klein also explores the way in which the Children’s Hospital in Vienna under Asperger’s management became “a key node in the system of sorting who would live and who would be killed.” Klein explains Asperger’s shift from caring to cruelty, from curiosity to homicidal, asking how we can resist this shift now. As a novelist, Jolie is less interested in the larger lessons and more interested in the moment-to-moment pain and chaos of those times. But there is a synergy between Klein’s work and Jolie’s, in that both seem to be on a journey to determine what makes us human and what destroys that humanity.

Adelheid is not a direct guide on that journey. As the novel begins, she is drawn in by Reich’s seeming love of order. When the Germans marched on Vienna, she was ready to confront them: “I have my flag already placed in a vase on the windowsill and I also have a brighter tin badge.” She slowly learns about his dark side, as cruel and arbitrary threats – including a threat to her own survival – are revealed.

No one hears Adelheid speak, but her inner voice is wild. In fact, her speech delivery can be so chaotic, with its constant distractions and random capitalizations, that at first I struggled to settle into her point. But I gradually warmed to her, to her troubled, needy remarks. It gives us moments of real danger – hiding from Nazis, escaping murder – and spaces of poignant ordinariness. In the end, Adelheid’s joy at this ordinariness adds up to a great paean to the humanity that the Nazis wanted to destroy: “The world is vastly diverse, bright, and wonderful. Everything is separate, recognizable, and quite brilliantly beautiful in its own right.”

At times, Julie becomes too preoccupied with her own research, so the narrative occasionally shifts, letting Adelheid’s perspective cross centuries and continents in order to explore Asperger’s legacy and how others view his actions. This makes the book a bit loose. But in the end, Jolie manages to put all of its parts together into a distinctive novel, bringing the darkness of Nazism and the courage of those who tried to resist it very close to the reader.

Natasha Walter’s next book, Feminism for a Burning World, will be published by Little Brown in May 2026. The Matchbox Girl by Alice Jolly is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support The Guardian, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery fees may apply.