A gentle diary of sentimental education that photographs adolescence and all its changes

What happens when you realize, for the first time, that you like someone? Viola became aware that she saw Marco with different eyes on an October afternoon, on a Monday, in the middle school yard while he is playing soccer and big white clouds are running in the sky, one looks like a bear. Marco, on the other hand, has had feelings for Viola for a while now, but they have been friends for many years, and you know that when you tell someone you like them, then things change, and almost never for the better. And it is right there, at the moment of awareness of new feelings, when everything should be simple and beautiful, that things instead become more complex. When do you stop being friends and perhaps become something else? How do you tell the difference?

How do you speak to the same person in a new voice? With what eyes does one look at it? How do you get over that giant cliff of awkwardness and misunderstanding without having to start all over again?

A gentle diary of sentimental education that photographs adolescence and all its changes, a novel about first loves but also about fragilities, and about stopping protecting yourself out of fear. Because it doesn’t matter if you are male or if you are female, if your body is changing and you can’t keep up with it, what matters is that we (re)begin to look into each other’s eyes. What we choose to see will depend only on us.

I don’t know why I ran away like that. Maybe because when you feel that you like someone a little bit, you get scared. Maybe love always makes us a little scared, I think… I feel like Marco has suddenly become a nice juicy apple, and I, on the other hand, I’m still kind of in the middle. A halfapple.