The high school students nominated “Ilaria or the conquest of disobedience” by the Italian author Gabriella Zalapi. A novel in which the innocence of a little girl is, as always, a fragile thing and the whole point is what it becomes afterwards.
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Published on 11/28/2024 at 6:23 p.m.
Reading time: 2 min
Lhe Femina Prize for High School Students and, we suppose, especially for High School Girls, had to choose between ten novels including that of Gabriella Zalapì, Ilaria, which was favored by the jury. Ilaria is, at the beginning of the novel, a little girl of almost nine years old with the program, without knowing it herself, of the book’s subtitle: “The Conquest of Disobedience”.
To put it bluntly, in a way that is not immediately accessible to Ilaria, she is kidnapped by her father who removes her, for two years, from the authority of her mother with whom she should be. But everything is blurry for the little girl who adapts to her father’s lies, constantly inventing new lives that are more or less credible. “Dad lies naturally, very politely, with his eyes. He gives a lot of details as if he were describing a picture. He does it so well, he is so precise, that everyone believes him. But all his lies don’t change this silence that grows between us. A real bag of knots. »
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