Following the instructions of one of her teachers at the actor’s school, Caroline, in her young teens reviews her short life. She is temperamental an sensitive and catches the readers up with a pile of emotions and feelings, full of sweetness, despair and reflections about herself and her family and social backgrounds… all in such a country as former Czechoslovakia, which is just leaving the communist dictatorship behind.
From her very first ballet steps, guided by her beloved grandmother in Prague, to the troubled love story with Lev, she will intensely go through all hazards that adolescence involves. Finally, she will find in the interpretation a beginning of a new, independent live, and she will feel free, both regarding the others (including Lev) and herself.
Iva Procházková (awarded with the German prize to children and young adult’s literature and nominated to Hans Christian Andersen Award), achieves with this novel for young adults a great narrative rhythm and a fluency that is difficult to find.
“… The writer weaves a novel that may seem simple at the first look but that is so well written, so perfectly outlined and so gifted with psychological depth, all thanks to a string of characters that are engraving (above all, the figure of the traditionalist grandmother who is her granddaughter’s best ally) and that walk with the main character in her process of growing up. The story catches the teenagers up due to its strong link of empathy between them and the narrator’s point of view, which shows them how adult life is and how she faces it, with its disillusionments and joy, without any absolute answers.” (Educación y Biblioteca Magazine).
"...The author proves that she understands teenagers’ minds…” (Children and Young Adults’ Literature Notebooks, CLIJ).