Summary
Simona Vinci: We don't know anything about children
A ten-year-old girl in a blue coat and red military boots sings in front of a sea of grain. That's Martina - she doesn't ask questions, she tries to understand with her eyes. Her gaze, which looks at the world with the enraptured, somewhat absent-minded wonder of the great sages, introduces the Reader to the perfect narration of a secret. In the summer, at the end of the school year, in a short, yet endless time, among the wheat and green fields of Granarola in Emilia Romagna, far from the eyes of adults, a group of children engages in increasingly dangerous forbidden games. Good, evil, joy, pain, disgust and even horror simply exist.
This is a novel that, like no other, gently and measuredly enters children's erotica: the ambiguous but innocent erotica of games away from the eyes of adults and the erotica tainted by the eyes of adults. It is a novel by a writer who follows Marguerite Duras and Lana McEwan, who knows how to narrate from the inside both about a child's and an already almost adolescent universe - both in its innocence and depravity, and in its games, smells, intimate things and former carefree certainties, along with Sound-garden's acid rock and the discovery of sexuality, the body and how inevitable and scary it is to grow up.
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