The day everything changed, Laura Pezzino, Il Battello a Vapore
Cora is 11 years old, she is a city girl who, due to a series of events, finds herself spending the summer in Brisca, a small village in the Tuscan-Romagna Apennines. It is there that her mother Tilda grew up and it is there that her grandmother has run a bar since time immemorial.
Cora’s plan is to dedicate herself to writing, her dream, but in reality day after day her head fills with increasingly bigger and more important things. She makes friends with a small group of boys from the town who introduce her to their circle of “partisans”, she reconstructs the memory of her family and at the same time manages to save her grandmother’s bar, put in danger by an old contract signed fifty years before it has to do with a fight between partisans and fascists.
Grandma Irma was a partisan relay, it is written in black and white in the diary that Cora found in an old trunk, her nom de guerre was Liliana and her contribution to the fight was precious.
Cora’s summer becomes a unique opportunity to understand how important it is in life to take sides and that freedom above all means action and responsibility.
In this period, there are more books on the shelves that tell younger people what the Resistance was. They have not always succeeded. Laura Pezzino’s voice, however, is authentic, we tested her enthusiasm first-hand at the Bologna Childen’s Book Fair in a meeting in which she spoke with Daniele Aristarco and Silvana Sola.
Cora is a credible teenager today, she is dealing with her difficulties (a mother who is not well and a distant father who lives in Stockholm), she knows nothing about her grandmother because she and her mother argued and, probably like many his peers, knows little or nothing about what the Resistance represented for our country. History with a capital S fits naturally into his existence between book challenges, swimming in the river and meeting with friends.
A well-documented novel in which you don’t feel at all what is sometimes forced in the telling of the story. Everything flows and contemporaneity and the past are happily intertwined.
