Crazy Diamond by David Chotjewitz, Doris Orgel (Translator)

From the Publisher

"I don't wanna be famous

I don't wanna be who you are

I don't wanna be a trademark

I don't wanna be a wannabe superstar

I wanna be infamous,

Incapable,

unfaceable,

untraceable..."

That's Mira M. And this is the story of her unforgettable life — as a kid alone in a junkyard tire swing, to her escape from Croatia at age nine in a Marshall amp road case in the rear of her uncle Lou's van. A musician, he hands her the key to her future: a guitar.

When she's fourteen, Mira meets Melody, Rosa, and Jackson, three teens who stow away from Ghana in a ship-ping container and end up — to their surprise — in Hamburg, Germany. What stories they have! And what a story the four of them, plus Kralle (a little older and wiser) and Zucka (the record producer's son), share on the way to the fame that all of them covet — except Mira, even after the MTV Awards show in Barcelona. Her song lyrics tell her truth.

But are they her lyrics? Her music? She swears so. But who listens, now that she's eighteen — and dead?

School Library Journal

Gr 9 Up- Beginning with a startling scene in which newly successful German pop star Mira M. is discovered floating face down in an aquarium, her body seeping blood from small holes the resident eel has bitten into her skin, this novel is a dramatic view of the fast-paced music scene in Hamburg. As a child, Mira was smuggled from Croatia to Germany in a guitar amplifier case by her uncle. As a runaway teen, she was befriended by another young homeless girl who later helped rescue three stowaway Ghanaian refugees from a shipping container on the Hamburg docks. This circle of friends grew to include Zucka, a young man from a more conventional background. His music-producer father helped first Melody, one of the girls from Ghana, and then Mira rise to fame. The author's depictions of Melody's growing jealousy as her failing career was supplanted by Mira's newfound success and Mira's reluctance to embrace fame with its accompanying interviews, clamoring fans, and grueling touring schedules give readers insightful glimpses into the friends' complex relationships. Using the aquarium as a symbol for the "fishbowl" lifestyle Mira struggles against is effective, as is the use of different typefaces to indicate portions of text being spoken by the dead girl or by other characters as they look back on events leading up to Mira's death. The labeling of chapters as if they were tracks on a CD is another constant reminder of the music scene. Older teens will find this a fascinating account of an aspect of contemporary European culture that has many parallels in the U.S.-Ginny Gustin, Sonoma County Library System, Santa Rosa, CA

Kirkus Reviews

When rising pop star Mira M. is found dead in the aquarium of her producer's on-loan apartment, she leaves the media and her friends to speculate on the true cause of her death, as well as whether her chart-topper was actually written by Melody, a friend and fellow singer. CD tracks instead of chapters delve into the intertwined backgrounds of Mira, spirited into Germany in an amp case from Yugoslavia; Melody, smuggled in a container from Ghana with two other teens; and Kralle, their rescuer. Each year, the friends gather to celebrate the anniversary of Melody and her companions' arrival in Hamburg. This gritty story, translated from German, alternates between the first anniversary party after Mira's death and the singer's memories and observations in the afterlife. As she recalls possible borderline personality disorder and certain industry burnout, readers begin to understand her fall from glory, but may never know all her secrets. Chotjewitz draws upon his work with teen musicians and actors to create an edgy tale of friendship and stardom. (afterword) (Fiction. YA)

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

[TRACK 1]

MELODY

1. Some people are special, you feel it right away. Even as children they somehow seem grown up, unapproachable, and in school they don't really belong with the others. Sometimes they are popular, sometimes not at all.

The way they present themselves makes them unmis-takable. They always stand in the center of things, whether they mean to or not. Whatever they say has particular weight, and there are always people who follow them wherever they lead.

Call it charisma. Something a person radiates. A kind of power.

And whether you have this power doesn't depend on what you do or want. You either have it or you don't.

Rosa was one of those people.

Not Melody. She wasn't ebony black like Rosa. With her light brown skin and slanted eyes she looked more Jamaican than African.

All through the tunnel she heard the echo of her heels, clack, clack, as she walked down the long platform in her dark pantsuit, the one she'd worn to the funeral. As usual she held her head just a little too straight, as though braced to answer in case anyone addressed her.

But no one saw her, the platform was deserted, the train had just pulled out. The time was noon. But here in thestation it was that indefinable, somewhere-between-day-and-night time that always stays the same.

Melody stopped in front of the Hamburg public transport map. She knew perfectly well how to get to OK's apartment. Nevertheless, she studied the black lines of the differentS-train routes traversing the sea of houses.

It's strange, she thought, how we can be in one place, where we live now, and at the same time someplace completely different, where we were a long time ago.Melody was in the Hamburg-Harburg S-train station, but also in Rose Hill, a few kilometers outside of Tema, in the south of Ghana.

She'd once read that every time you remember something, it changes a little, because you aren't remembering the original experience, but rather the memory of it. So then you just remember the memory of the memory. And so on. And it changes every time. Like when you're a kid playing Telephone, except all by yourself.

How often she'd stood in front of these neon-lit maps in S-train stations and remembered the little girl standing before the weather-beaten, ragged map with holes in it on the wooden plank wall of the store in Rose Hill. And she remembered how the sea had grown darker every day. She remembered the countries, yellow, like gas lamps. And how, like gas lamps, they had gone out.

As the platform around her again filled with people, Melody felt herself standing in that little store with the world map on its wall. She'd stood there every day. She'd almost known that map by heart: knew where the snake turned darker blue as it swam around the Cape of Good Hope. The deeper the sea, the darker the snake, so the teacher had explained.

Melody remembered the spider that crossed from Africa to Spain. The lines that showed the ships' routes were the spider's web. And she remembered the little ants creeping over the equator. They'd made so many holes in the paper that underneath America the planks of the wall showed through....

No little creatures ran over the map of Hamburg. And there was no dark blue sea. However, there was the river and the harbor.

And for this, she thought, you risked your life. You let yourself be locked into a stinking container for cargo. How long ago was that? Seven years! Sometimes she couldn't believe she'd been through all that to be here now and struggle on.

Yes, now she owned things she didn't have then, and surely would never have acquired back in Tema. The dark pantsuit. And the white leather boots. And yet she was the same person—the girl who'd stood before the wooden wall looking at the world map, dreaming of a ship, and also the young woman in the pantsuit who sorted letters in the Finance Ministry and struggled toward a second career because she still dreamed of becoming a singer....

Melody turned from the S-train map and checked the electronic schedule.

"Don't dream," her mother had said, pulling her away from the map of the world on the store wall. "If you want to live, you have to be awake."

But aren't we always dreaming? By day, by night? When we talk and run and think, we don't see or hear them, but the dreams are there.

She glanced up again at the arrival board. Five more minutes. The train was late. She walked over to the small kiosk and saw on the cover of Bravo Mira M. in a bikini, with her guitar, hair dyed blond, piled high. Mira on the covers of all the teen magazines. And on some others. Even on Frau im Spiegel, whose older readers had probably never heard of Mira before. On that cover, only half visible, Melodyread,...SANG ABOUT FREEDOM AND LOVE AND ENDED IN AN AQUARIUM. The cover of another had this quote: MIRA M.: 'I AM A LIE.' And Für Sie inquired: DID MIRA M. LEAVE A LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT? No mention of the autopsy anywhere. Those results were not yet known.

On the cover of the Morgenpost, stacked next to the cash register, she read: POP STAR DEAD: NOW HER OLD FRIENDS HAVE THEIR SAY.

And, yes, Zucka had given an interview at the ceme-tery, right after the funeral, looking even more awkward than usual in his formal black suit, way too wide. Melody smiled. And right in front of the camera, in the middle of the interview, he'd taken out his cell phone and explained to whomever that he didn't have time just then.

At least Rosa had waited a little longer to do the Pop Tonight interview. Melody wondered, Would I have, this soon? Yes, if she'd been asked. Which didn't happen. Naturally. Mira's official friends got precedence over her official enemies.

Melody remembered a conversation from six months or so ago, when she and Mira were still able to just talk with each other. Back then Mira had told her that actually she, Mira, did not write her songs to be the center of attention and have everybody looking at her; no, she wrote them to hide behind, so people would understand her without actually seeing her.

That didn't exactly explain it.

That same time Mira told about hearing the voices. And about being afraid. Melody asked herself, Why did she tell me, of all people?

2. In all honesty, I ask myself that question too.

Melo was the exact opposite of me.

For instance, once when we were in the S-train, Melody overheard two girls talking about her.

"No way. That's not her," said one. "Is so," said the other. "I just saw her at Traxx."

Melody smiled. Yes, she'd sung at Traxx a few days before.

Melody was delighted; she loved being recognized, loved giving autographs.

Not me. That sort of thing gave me hives.

Melody thought standing in the spotlight, everyone staring at you, was fantastic.

I thought it was awful.

Here's what I really wanted in my life: three kids someday, a rich husband—I wouldn't have minded if he looked like one of the guys in Tocotronic (my all-time favorite band)—and a little house someplace where it's green. That didn't work out, I guess because I was too young....

Something else worked out: We got on the charts, with—of all my songs!—"Don't Wanna Be Famous." OK had known right away, of course. "It's got potential," was how he put it.

What Melody couldn't make happen for her in two years happened for us instantly. Without any big marketing plan. Our single took off like a rocket.

And that's how it felt, like being shot into orbit.

Later Kralle said to me, "Mira, you've aged five years in these five months." Could be. Five years in five months. A hundred fifty roller-coaster days. As though I'd known I didn't have much time left.

Naturally one changes. Toward the end the pressure was enormous. OK had invested a lot of money, and I was scared that I wouldn't be able to hold up, or that the album would flop.

Despite all that, it was fantastic. MTV put our video in rotation. The hype was on, full blast. At the tour premiere—it was in Berlin—Rosa breezed into the dressing room, yelling,"It's crazy! People lined up along the whole street!" What we'd never expected, not even in our dreams, happened at that first concert: The audience joined in, with every song, it seemed! Even though the album wasn't out yet, only two singles. They'd downloaded the songs from the Internet. It was like a great big party, people by the thousands.

I stood at the mike, the band behind me, and it just worked. Everybody playing our thing, not even needing to look at one another. I was the music, and everyone sang, and the people in the front row reached their hands out, tried to touch me....

It's only rock 'n' roll—but I like it.

Teens papered their rooms with my posters. Suddenly I got cool clothes, hand-delivered straight from the designers—free! Because I'd been transformed into a walking commercial.Whatever I wore, countless girls would be wearing very soon.

One day a brand-new Smart Cabrio stood parked under OK's posh apartment. Melody had lived there. Now I did. OK kept it to put up important musicians when they were in town for a few days. "That only happens every few months," he'd assured me, "while you're probably on tour."

"The car keys are in your mailbox. Hop in and drive it," said Zucka's message on my machine.

Anyway, I was a "celeb" now. If you looked in any newspaper, you'd see that I'd been in five places the same evening at the same time. Right...Sometimes we did get around like that.

It was a five-month roller coaster all right, going higher, always higher, so it seemed. We opened more than one case of champagne the day we got the invitation to the MTV Awards. In the middle of that night, in the middle of that high, I stood before the mirror in some club or other. All around me were girls with too much makeup on. And I looked into my face in the mirror and asked myself, When will you hurtle down?

I was stoned too often and let the stress and media hype get to me...You could say I suffered from so-called exhaustion depression, though basically I was all right. Just sometimes I felt totally burned out, that's all. I got a prescription for that, which probably was why I miscalculated the effect of the speed. But that's another story.

Anyway, after we got back from Barcelona, when I left the Hamburg bar where we'd been celebrating and went to the taxi stand, there—at three a.m.—all of a sudden was Melody, the last person I wanted to see. For months she'd been tormenting me, insisting that she'd written "Don't Wanna Be Famous." When, in fact, as she'd explained to me earlier, it was a shitty song in her opinion. But, well, now that we were on the charts and all...

She stood in front of me, glaring. I'm so stupid, I still tried to be nice. She said, "Why don't you just pick up the phone?"

I was cold, I was tired, I'd popped too many pills. "What do you want?"

"Only what belongs to me."

"And what is that?"

"My share."

Then, alone in the taxi, I suddenly felt like talking to Kralle, couldn't find her number. Damn! I remembered deleting it the last time I got mad at her. I put the cell phone away.

The taxi radio was on, very soft, and we drove through the dark city for half an eternity. I dozed off, and every time I half awoke I heard low voices, the woman dispatcher giving street names, house numbers, interspersed with bits of talk, drivers calling in, not finding an address or name. The taxi swayed and I kept nodding off, with the radio sounds and the din from the concert buzzing in my ears.

And then in the apartment, when I lay down on the huge sofa, there were noises coming from the harbor and I told myself, Go close the terrace door while you're still awake. Or you'll catch cold and won't sing well tomorrow. But I stayed on the sofa, staring at the white ceiling with the silver lamps. And I heard them.

Voices. Still there. Very low, saying short, meaningless phrases, like on the taxi radio. But why was the taxi radio on, here in the apartment? I closed my eyes, opened them again. Finally I stood up and washed my face. But the voices kept on.

After a while I thought, Maybe the TV..., because it was always on. But just then it wasn't. I walked through the large room, only half dark, because a little light came in from the Elbe. This apartment, so weird somehow. And cell phones all over the place. I tried each one, and nothing. But still the voices. I stuffed earplugs in my ears and stuck my headset on. No use. The voices continued. Saying nothing in particular, and so softly that you had to listen closely, like in the taxi. I still know what one kept whispering: "Hello...Hello, are you still there?" Then suddenly another said, "I'm wearing a white T-shirt."

I thought, Stay calm, Mira, you're wasted, you haven't slept in ages, you've got to really sleep. But that didn't work. Sometimes I nodded off, but just for moments. And I lay there wide awake again, in my clothes. It was still dark out, but slowly dawn was coming. I felt like I was made of glass. The whispering kept on, right by my ear.

And it didn't stop.

Copyright text © 2005 by CARLSEN Verlag, GmbH, Hamburg