Il silenzio dell’acciuga

Tresa was educated by her father to be silent and disciplined. She must resemble completely to Gero, her twin bother: same clothes and same composure. Nobody seems to care about her being a girl. But when her father abandon both of them to their aunt, things begin to change. Most of all is the relationship between brother and sister that becomes more and more difficult, because – acknowledging her femininity – the aunt creates a big distance between them.

When the aunt take the twins to work in a piece of land she owns in the country, Tresa welcomes this chance as a liberation, because school has become a cage of hardship for her: everyone says she’s like an anchovy, graceless and not suitable for the table of the rich. That land and that house will be theater of Tresa’s first dangerous romance, the discover of her body, of shame and… secrets. The rule of silence endures in her family. The less you say the better. In the silence Tresa will have to find a way to build her self, to understand what grief and confront are, what is a woman and what one has to face when growing up. In this novel Lorena Spampinato tells the coming of age of a young girl in the fearful world of adults and their misdeeds, and she does so through a musical, elegant language and a frank writing, dark and yet bright.