ILARIA; or the Conquest of Disobedience
One afternoon in May,eight-year-old Ilaria gets into the car with her father, thinking they’reheading to dinner with her mother and sister. Instead, she is taken across theborder, on a whirlwind road trip around Italy with her father, from Tri-esteto Sicily.
So begins a never-endingjourney – they sleep in roadside motels and sing along to the radio. ButIlaria’s father is unpre-dictable, and she never knows which version of him shewill get: charming and funny, or volatile and drunk. Torn between her life inGeneva with her mother and this strange, shifting adven-ture on the road, Ilariadoesn’t know who to side with in her par-ents’ acrimonious separation.
Along the way, she meets arag-tag cast of characters, learns how to light a cigarette, clings to herbeloved teddy bear Birillo, and slowly figures out when to stay silentaround her father, to protect herself. Based on the author’s own experi-ences,this deeply moving novel captures the blurred lines be-tween love and harm,memory and reality, fear and won-der. Ilaria is a haunting, intimatecoming-of-age story about a girl forced to grow up too soon, and about thefragile moments of beauty she finds along the way.