L’ultimo faro

Summer: fourteen boys and girls spend three weeks’ holiday in a fascinating and isolated place, a lighthouse that twenty years ago was still in use and now has been turned into a live-in facility.

They have different ages (from 12 to 16) and social backgrounds as well as different reasons for being included into the group. They are seven boys and seven girls, each of them with different problems that range from eating disorders, disturbance in attention, video addiction, socialisation problems, family financial troubles. This is why they have difficulty even in relating to each others.Three coaches plan their days with activities that range from boat rides, and environment observation to games and nature trails, and above all try to make them connect with each others.The novel has two levels of storytelling: a framework with an external viewpoint on the days spent at the lighthouse, the relations between the kids and the coaches, and a mysterious love story of may years past. Inside this framework,   there are fourteen firsthand stories, the voices of the characters that tell about themselves and explain how they ended up in this beautiful but lonely place, and narrate a part of the story they are living, in strict interconnection with the external storytelling.At the end of the book, we finally discover who collected all the stories and narrated in third person: one of the “internal” narrators is also an “external” narrator, not easy to detect in the group which yet comprises a fond reader and a poetry lover.  But talent for writing does not occur in a predictable way and adolescence is a time for huge potential.