Many parents—mothers and fathers alike, and also relatives, educators, priests, doctors, friends—will see themselves in these beautiful pages. Written with intelligence and heart, in Italian of a kind we rarely encounter today.
MicheLa Capone is a mother of three: two daughters and a son, Marco, who occupies the center of this true story. The author is a magistrate at the Juvenile Court in Cagliari. She is happily married to Francesco, a doctor who stands steadfastly beside his wife and is a loving father to their children.
Marco is the protagonist, and his mother, with striking honesty, with tenderness and love, recounts the unexpected birth of a child with Down syndrome—a child "different" from what anyone wishes for, whose growth and development are abnormal, difficult, unsettling, and put the whole family through its paces.
Marco is beautiful, he is engaging, but his behavior is difficult and strange. This launches the family into a desperate, relentless search for a name for his "condition": doctors' visits, tests, repeated evaluations, encounters and conflicts with medical staff. The search for a place—a school, a church—that will welcome him with all his troubles and peculiarities.
Throughout the narrative (which some may find lengthy), the mother—desperate, furious, disconsolate, sad—gives way to personal reflections, intimate thoughts, and wholly understandable outpourings directed now at Marco, now at her husband, now at her daughters or a friend. These passages appear in italics, as if to mark their intimacy. They are perhaps the most beautiful pages in the book, and they are what make it a genuine emblematic account of what many of our readers already know—and what others ought to encounter and think deeply about.
M.B., 2010