When Maria Grazia, a physician and author, receives a cancer diagnosis, her first thought is of her son Matteo. Matteo is autistic—profoundly sensitive to every detail around him, and thrown into distress by the smallest change. How will he cope with the upheaval about to overtake their family? Maria Grazia meets the illness with remarkable strength and deep faith. She does not surrender to despair; instead, she draws energy from her son's surprising gestures—discovering him to be a resource rather than a burden. She describes their days with simple clarity: chemotherapy appointments mixed in with homework and household tasks. You feel her long scientific and human experience on every page, yet the book never becomes dense or abstract.
Like the fairy tales of old, perhaps when life grows hard we need to recover a little of that "magic" that can do so much for us. Even—sometimes—a happy ending.