Anežka – Hanišová Viktorie (2015)

We do not choose our parents. Sometimes we choose our children. The novel debut of Viktorie Hanišová reveals the tragic consequences of one bad choice. Confident, educated, and worldly-wise Julie cannot have children, and without a partner, she has no right to be included in the adoption program, while her biological clock is ticking. The dream of little Anežka, a blonde doll with pigtails, gradually turns into an unfulfilled dream, but desperate Julie wants a child at any cost. She navigates through authorities and the law and takes in Agnes, an unwanted Romani child. However, Julie only wanted a baby, Anežka, not a bundle of her own prejudices, not the embodiment of a neuralgic point of Czech society, which she did not choose. She begins to lie. First to others, later even to herself. And Agnes grows up in a constant struggle with others' perceptions of herself. The readers are offered a painfully ordinary glimpse into the already disrupted relationship between mother and daughter, marred by the petty bourgeois anxiety of one and the impossibility of breaking free from the cage of stereotypes of the other. The novel is grounded in realism. The decline of the main character does not take the form of some inverted bildungsroman, but rather an ordinary, and all the more tragic series of everyday stumbles that can happen to anyone.