MY SUMMER BROTHER

Vogel's fourth story about Ilse, a nine-year-old German child living in bygone upper-middle-class tranquility, begins just a few weeks after the death of her twin sister Erika. A young man of 20 moves in next door and immediately adopts Ilse as his ""sister."" She adores him, but is unhappy when Dieter also becomes attentive to her mother. With father busy with his work as always, Dieter accompanies Ilse and her mother on a mountain vacation. There Ilse's jealousy continues, and she also glimpses aspects of her mother as a woman that she would rather not see. Like the previous Ilse stories, this is told entirely from Ilse's naive viewpoint and it has the same delicate, bittersweet aura.