The book jacket of this first novel by a young Russian woman now living in Germany tells us that her name (Alina Bronsky) is a pseudonym. Why, I wonder, does she want to disguise herself when she has committed a very assured, sharp and funny book?

The narrator and protagonist of "Broken Glass Park" (Europa Editions, 221 pages, $15) is 17-year-old Sascha Naimann, a Russian girl living in a housing project in Berlin. She has three fierce ambitions: to make sure her young half-siblings grow up safely, to write a book honoring her mother, and to kill Vadim, the stepfather who two years earlier killed her mother, Marina, and Marina's gentle new boyfriend. The last plan will have to wait until Vadim gets out of prison, which is quite a long time down the road.

Sascha is smart and tough and has a wonderfully tart, distinctive voice, ably captured by Tim Mohr, who translated the book into English. She describes a woman's voice "using sentences of mostly monosyllabic words, words that popped out of her mouth like peas." Thinking of Vadim, she writes in her "educational handbook," "Watch out for people who feel weak. They may want to feel strong one day and you might not ever recover from that."

One day she comes across an interview with Vadim in a respected national newspaper (probably the Frankfurter Allgemeine) that shows him as contrite and rather sympathetic. Enraged, she gets on a train to Frankfurt and storms into the paper's headquarters to dress down the reporter and her "shameless and stupid" article. The section editor, Volker Trebur, invites her into his office and tells her he totally agrees. The reporter is an intern and, had he not been away on vacation, he would not have published such an uncritical piece. To make amends, he tells Sascha to call him if he can help her in any way. Which she does when Maria, the Russian woman supposedly taking care of Sascha and her young brother and sister, lets her boyfriend visit the apartment. His presence makes Sascha furious -- so much in life does -- and she invites herself to Volker's home near Frankfurt.

The wary, friendly-but-prickly relationship she forms with him and his teenage son, Felix, who has recurrent lung crises that send him to the emergency room, is conveyed in spot-on dialogue. Sascha grows to like Felix, even, to her dismay, to pity his condition, and the two experiment with sex. She also, again to her annoyance, falls a little in love with Volker and makes a seduction attempt. Driving with him as the sun shines through rain, he wonders if there will be a rainbow. "It would be too kitschy," she retorts. "'Life is kitschy,' he says. 'Nothing but kitsch and clichés and things you've heard a hundred times before, tasteless plot lines and dialogue that wouldn't make the cut in any halfway decent screenplay.'" That observation captures Sascha's attitude about life and the stupidity of most of the people she comes in contact with.

Though her circumstances seem bleak, Sascha is a trouper whose company you'll hugely enjoy.

Brigitte Frase is a writer in Minneapolis.