Plot Summary

In letters to her idol, Brad Pitt, twelve-year-old Tina Vonlanthen pours out her heart about what life in a small Swiss border town on the Rhine is like: trouble with her older sister, twenty-year-old Babs, "who still hasn't found a man," and worries about her single father Urs, who has been so distracted lately. But it is neither spinsterhood nor Alzheimer's that the Vonlanthens suffer from. Rather, it is the small and large love affairs that they try to keep secret from each other: Babs' lover is her married German boss—and Urs' girlfriend is Caroline, a black woman from Cameroon. At the local big event, the "fish dinner," everything comes out in the open—and Tina also has some heart-pounding experiences that she prefers to keep quiet about in her letters to Brad...