THE GLASS CHILD
Elisa Pilia
Two narratives built on two different timelines alternate in The Glass Girl. Both have the voice of Étienne who, now with the innocent eyes of a 12-year-old and now with the heavy heart of a 26-year-old, recounts the Nazi invasion of France in the summer of 1940 and the journey, undertaken fourteen years later, to find a friend who disappeared in the chaos of war. In that chaos that has the stench of burned houses and the sound of guns and tanks in the streets, Étienne meets a little girl who lacks words. Aili is Jewish, no longer has a family, and suffers from aphasia. Forced into silence, she has found new ways to communicate. Étienne will learn from her that with the shades of glass, voiceless stories can be told. Some time later, in 1954, the letter left by a German soldier who had risked his own life to help the two boys reopens a drawer of memory that was never really closed. It triggers in Étienne the impulse for a quest he had vowed not to undertake. It is the beginning of an investigation full of surprises, finds, and revelations where the threads of mysterious ties between Aili and the generous soldier are woven together, and where it will still be the nuances of the stained glass windows that will make sense of a past that seemed only to be forgotten.