Out of Focus — A Review

«War breathed down our necks, its breath pulling men from their homes. And it was ready only to spit back their chewed bones». Set during World War I, Chiara Carminati's novel for young readers captures a thirteen-year-old girl confronting something monstrous—something that threatens to sweep away her community, her world, her right to grow up whole. The truth comes to Jole at once: war tears, breaks, separates, kills, mangles. As everything crumbles around her, she and her little sister Mafalda find solace with a stranger—a woman her mother sends them to before being taken away on a false accusation of treason. For Jole, this becomes an encounter with a hidden piece of her own story through a person—blind—who can open her eyes to life itself. Out of Focus is thus, more broadly, a meditation on all those pushed to the margins of History, yet risking being destroyed by it all the same.