BOOK REVIEW - QUALCOSA BY CHIARA GAMBERALE

Can you guess what to feel hard or to feel too much mean? Princess “Qualcosa di Troppo” knew it. Qualcosa di troppo means something too much in Italian.

She cried too much , laughed too much, slept too much, ate too much and, above all, she wanted too much.

When her mother died, she was left with a hole in the place of her heart and she started filling it with everything she could find: something funny, something right, love, another love and another one.

She felt nothing, she was not happy, she was not sad, she did not eat, she did not sleep and this made her become numb.

But one day she met a boy; his name was “Cavalier Niente” (Knight Nothing) who spent all the day avoiding doing what was important. 

Thanks to him, the princess understood that the hole she hated so much did not have to be filled; she had to bear it because it was part of herself and, even though she had to wait, she would find the missing piece, the perfect piece for her heart.

What is better than a book that can be read with the lightness of childhood but at the same time, can teach you something? Chiara Gamberale manages to convey so much in her lovely fairy-tale full of drawings and strange characters who live bizarre lives.

Actually many issues of present day society are dealt with in this book: social network, extreme necessity of finding love, of not being alone, drug addiction among others. 

And what are they? 

They are only ways people use to not feel their hole or to fill it.

What makes you truly happy or what do you need to be happy? 

These two questions are completely different.

The first one is like “you have everything to be happy, what it that you prefer is?”

The second one, instead, is “you aren’t happy; you wish to have MORE, MORE AND MORE.”

I think we do not have to fill our lives with everything or spend our life always looking for something we don’t have. We should learn how to live through the pain and thanks to it to become stronger and to grow up. We should look for what may fix us.

"I’ll say it again, bear that hole." 

When too many awful things happen, it takes us a while to accept them and, at first, we can’t even believe they are true. 

And, while our head takes its time trying to understand them, our heart turns into a piece of gruyère. Hence, don’t hate it, don’t hate your hole, stroke it from time to time but don’t get too attached to it, otherwise it will never pass. 

Finally, little Princess: if you let it be and accept it without making a din, you’ll see that in a year it’ll start narrowing and will even turn into something precious to have inside”

Sometimes I hate what I feel and sometimes, instead, what I feel makes me happy, even though it is not the best feeling ever; and you? What do you do to fill the hole inside you?

Martina