THE GREAT VALUE OF TIME
Even if we don’t like it, we all depend on time. I am always lacking time. 48 hours days should exist in order to be able to do all I need to do, and everything I would like to do. I sense the passing of time with the years, one more year and it seems as if hours were even faster, or I am slower, I never know what to think. I also try to take the most out of the moments I like, the ones I would like to never end: family gatherings, weekends with my kin, the hours practicing sport, a coffee with my friends, and sunsets at the seaside. Years go by and, without even realizing, we are past forty and thinking that it is better to have a birthday than not to have it.
However, after reading the book EL LADRÓN DE MINUTOS (The Minute’s Thief) by David Lozano, I thought it wouldn’t be at all bad that my birthday disappeared from the calendar and I could stop the time and my age, and not have to worry about this feeling that life escapes from my hands. But I am certain it would have its consequences, as it happens to Edu, the main character of the story, who is ten years old and really doesn’t like having his birthday stolen. So, he tries to take it back. In order to do that, he goes to the Shop of Forbidden Things, where he will get the Suctioning Machine of Time, capable of stealing minutes in order to regain and collect them until reaching a complete day. It seems easy and, without thinking in its consequences, he starts the hunt for good moments… of others. This way, step by step, he becomes a true addict to these minutes that conform others’ happiness, and stops living the present. He will abandon his best friend, his classmates, he will stop playing football, he will forget about his studies… and fall into an unhappy and selfish life of which he will not awake until the very last moment, when he finds himself forced to decide what to give true value in life.
A masterful incursion by Lozano into the world of the little ones in the house, with a fun story that gives value to values and, yet only because of that, is already worth not missing.