Best friends Mischa and Nits are close, together they rhyme and philosophise. For example, about the ambition of firebugs that prefer to climb over four trainers instead of crawling past them. The 14-year-old Mischa also has to develop a lot of ambition to keep up appearances and ensure that nobody, not even Nits, the novel's first-person narrator, finds out about his secret. Mischa, the perfect pupil and big brother, wears the mask of an ideal world in a conspicuously inconspicuous manner. In the course of the story, he is forced to gradually reveal his precarious financial and family situation to Nits. Stefanie Höfler succeeds in telling the story of those growing up in poverty in a touching and understandable way. Although poverty is still a socially taboo subject in Germany today, the book encourages people to deal with it intensively and without shame. At the same time, it encourages those affected to open up, to seek and to accept help without a guilty conscience. Stefanie Höfler anchors the story in the reader's memory with simple, yet very precisely chosen words.
This title was nominated by the youth jury for the 2023 German Children՚s Literature Award.