Caterina Controvento

What do the First World War and the bicycle have in common? Caterina, who loves to challenge everyone and pedal uphill. A book that makes you reflect, with delicacy and depth, through the eyes of a little girl, on the atrocities of war. Caterina is eleven years old, two noisy brothers, a mother who runs the farm and a father at the front, enlisted in the army of a King. She lives not far from the great river, where the earth and the water join hands and where a great war is about to end, thanks to one last decisive and painful battle. Yes, right there where the waters of the Piave flow placidly and murmur ancient stories Caterina spends her days. She doesn't know it, she's just a little girl with a head full of amazing ideas and serious thoughts, but there are only seven days left until the long-awaited victory. Caterina's days are marked by many different moments: the games with her brothers, the hard hours at school, the thousand jobs to help her mother, the sudden and sweet memories of her father at war, the meeting with a bizarre and mysterious character, the march of tired and gloomy soldiers along his country. The war has lasted too long, it disrupts people's lives, it looms threateningly. The little girl has had a great dream that has accompanied her since she was little, to own a bicycle, all her own, to jump on, pedal along the streets, throw it, crazy, under the sun and under the rain, everywhere. The magnificent, unattainable and blue thing sits there in a villa, inside a fairytale garden, enclosed in a park. Nobody uses it, nobody accompanies it, nobody drags it on adventures. A temptation too strong to stop a girl like her, a true true contrarian, tenacious and tender, someone who would challenge even the force of the wind without fear. With pedal strokes, uphill. Yes... her name, real and full, has always been: Caterina Controvento! Ages 10 and up.