Wonder for the YA market meets I Am Not Okay With This. A coming-of-age, emotional novel set in the Italian countryside about the power of friendship and finding identity.
How do you overcome the trauma of a disfigured face in the days of Social Media?
A bad accident on a moped leaves Nina, 15, with scars and bandages all over her face and forces her to question everything she’s ever known: friends she no longer feels connected to, a beautiful mother who’s always at the mercy of the latest boyfriend, and a guy who broke her heart without even realizing it. The solution for Nina is to escape. She leaves Milan and moves to the Piedmont’s hills to stay with her estranged father, an eccentric photographer who lives in a campervan parked in the garden of the old family home.
It’s a whole new world compared to the buzz of the city she’s used to, full of strange but wonderful people: like Tommaso, a blunt and peculiar boy who knows all book endings by heart; or Alisha, originally from India, who dreams of becoming a comedian. Nina’s only link to the past is her best friend Filippo, the only one from school who knows about the accident.
During this unconventional summer, Nina will start to overcome her own trauma, exorcising the fear of her “new face” through the most implausible of the tools: the world of Social Networks. Nina will soon realise that to be heard in life, you first need to find your own voice.