WHITE AS SILENCE, RED AS SONG

A love triangle made more complex because one of the geometric points is sick with leukemia.

Leo loves Beatrice. He loves her even though he’s never actually spoken to her, even though she never answers his text messages. When he learns from his friend Silvia that Beatrice has leukemia, his life erupts in a chaos of emotion. One good thing to come out of his grief is that he donates blood. He also writes her a letter expressing his emotions, but on his way to deliver it he gets into an accident on his scooter and winds up in the hospital. Will he ever make his feelings for her known? Or will he see the stoic girl standing by his side supporting him as a friend in a more romantic light? Translated from the Italian, this book tends toward the repetitive and esoteric. Dialogue feels stilted and off-key, often marred by an overabundance of exclamation points and lines that don’t reflect how teenagers naturally speak: “ ‘We’ve got to put those losers to shame!’ I beam with delight. What would school be like without the soccer tournament?” The sluggish plot relies on the dry discourse of characters who spend a lot of time pondering their unlucky situations.

A book about young people dealing with cancer that never moves beyond illness as a mechanism for self-discovery.