Bruno Blog

The new trimester has started, we’re back for three weeks now and the adaptation is different for every kid. As parents, we hope that if there is a change of school, as it is my case, the child, I mean, the teenager, fits well, make friends and especially surround himself with good companions. Friendships are important at this age, indeed, they are basic, I would say, because becoming a teenager is not easy and there are many ‘inputs’ that may have an effect on our everyday life. I do not want to be an overprotecting mum but neither do I want to be a too cool one, and the right balance is difficult to reach.

Those who have been through this can, perhaps, help us, novices, to face this new stage. For this reason after reading Santi Baró‘s book, MEMORIAS DE UN CADÁVER, I felt the need to recommend it to all the teenagers I know and to their parents as well. Bela, the protagonist, doesn’t achieve to adapt and has no friends. She doesn’t find any meaning in life and has many fears that she cannot get over. She thinks that the only way out is to close her eyes and let go, but is that really the only way out?

Santi Baró knows how to deal with this sensitive issue without hurting sensitivities and how to write down in black and white the problem that more than a teenager may have suffered without anyone of the family or friends aware of the situation. Because we don’t all live or see things the same way but we have to make an effort to put ourselves in the others’ shoes and to lend a hand if necessary. Not only teachers must work on this subject at school but also the parents themselves, for they are the first who must educate their children with values and give them the correct tools to be strong but also to learn to empathize, to help and not hurt the people around you.

With this reading we are taking a first step, and I congratulate the publishing house SM for having the courage to publish a book dealing with a tough subject. The subject is tough but it concerns anyone, and it’s even necessary to talk about it if it is treated with respect, sensitivity and that empathy Santi has with his audience. A brilliant novel that helps you think about life and death, but almost without realizing it…

This week we celebrate San Juan. On June the 23rd, it’s the eve party night and we welcome the summer with firecrackers and rockets. This is the shortest night of the year but also one of the most intense, which many describe as magical. For me, it’s a party I especially like because it is celebrated among friends and family but also because it announces the beginning of the summer season, with more light, livelier people, eager to enjoy the well-deserved vacations and to try to put aside the harshness of the rest of the year in order to enjoy a little bit more of everything. We loosen up and let more fluidity get in our lives, with less strict schedules and more improvised lunches and dinners, terraces and moments spent with friends, even on weekdays. So, San Juan eve has for everyone its meaning but it is a celebration day for everyone, and joy is the main course in every home. That’s why Care Santos has dedicated a book to that special party, published by editorial Base. I highly recommend the reading of that book for young ones, and especially during these dates where books take a second place, I am aware of that, but luckily it is not the case for stories. Stories should always be part of our lives and part of the daily lives of the children, so that the habit of reading becomes a pleasure instead of an obligation.

Care Santos also just got a novel published, for older kids between 8 and 10 years-old, and for those who like the culinary subject, which is very fashionable these days with television programs that are audience leaders, such as MasterChef. Care has created the character LAURA CHEF, a girl who has signed up for a cooking course during the summer and this book will be her notebook of master classes with professor Lechuga (Lettuce, in English), a worldwide known chef. This is the perfect book to make our kids’ holidays start with a smile, to make them feel like reading and perhaps like cooking too, a perfect activity that can be shared with the family, without getting burned. There will be more books about Laura, because I’m sure that the little readers will devour the first one in no time at all. This is not a reading only for girls, because we have noticed that the cooking theme is appreciated by all genders, although girls will more likely feel identified with the character that Care has embroidered.

As for now there is only one in the market, but you can mix LAURA CHEF’s reading with the four previously published books from the YES WE DANCE series. It is the story of a group of girls whose passion is dancing and that will also get to travel to New York and some more countries too, on tour with their idols and fulfilling their dream. Nevertheless, they will soon realize that the lives of celebrities are not as great as it seems and that fame has a price. KITCHEN AND DANCE, here are two of the currently fashionable things, so that the kids can have ensured a good reading, and also the children that don’t discard to have a look to these little girls’ adventures, because you always learn.

Finally, we have the ideal books for the teens: EBLUS trilogy, by Care Santos, which I already mentioned previously on this blog, and also Santi Baró’s book entitled L’EFECTE CALDERS, winner of the 2016 Joaquim Ruyra prize. The novel does not pretend to be a tiresome book about the Catalan writer Pere Calders, because it makes a portrait of him and his literature which is really great. Xavier, the main character, has some problems making friends, he is a great comics reader and the only thing he wants is to avoid his parents, so that they let him spend a quiet august month in Llançà, one of the most beautiful fishing villages on the Catalan coast, where the unexpected friendship with the eccentric writer Pere Calders, who also spend his summers there, will change the path of his life.

These are the five readings we recommend for these holidays, for different age groups. The parents who are disoriented, like us, but still believe that reading is a pleasure and a habit that the young ones have to see at home, won’t let down their children if we recommend them some of these mentioned adventures. A good book is a great traveling partner; you already know that, don’t forget it and let’s enjoy it.

I was able to read this in the newspaper El País from a few days ago: “The German publishing world suffered a small revolution last year. The news that Mein Kampf (the wicked book that had been out of stock for 70 years) was about to be reedited caused a great debate. On one side where the ones who defended the project of introducing in a critical way the thesis Adolf Hitler started writing since he was captive in Munich in 1924. On the other hand, those who were afraid it would be used as inspiration by the new puppies of the extreme right wing. The controversy even reached the German Secret Services, which concluded that the interest in the extremist circles about the foundation of National Socialism had dropped in the last decades”.

News like this make us think that Hitler, Nazism and their surroundings will never lose interest for most people, because even though it seems like we know it all, there’s always little historical gaps from which we can get information and that will give us new perspectives, and most of all, new novels that at first can seem like the same, but are not. I think that EL INFORME AHNENERBE is a novel with a lot of potential and Santi Baró’s first adult fiction book, in which he’s learned to be historically accurate in the part of Himmler and an absolutely original and frenetic novel itself, that gives us that game of a novel inside a novel. Here’s the summary:

Ten years after the publishing of the Ahnenerbe report, by Marcos Clos, a kid with no identity who’s hidden with his parents for nine years in an apartment in Barcelona, disappears under strange circumstances, as strange as his own life. Nagore, the private teacher that’s in charge of his schooling, will be the one to find out the truth of his disappearance and, later on, of his parents. All the clues lead precisely to Marcos. With him as an ally, she will relive the scenes the author lived ten years before in a search that, without meaning it, will make them find the real treasure Hitler was looking for in the heart of the Montserrat Mountain. A perfectly built novel, with great doses of suspense and constant unexpected twists that relives historical moments in the I and IX centuries, and perfectly recreates the Ahnenerbe society, an organization that’s built into the SS, whose leaders wanted to create a new elite body of warrior monks, a true Black Order, based on old German Paganism and the dogmas of faith in Nazism, which wanted to end Christianism.

A revealing story that makes two thousand years of Christianity blow up in the air. An exciting mystery that leaves the reader without breath. The typical historical action novel that both men and women like, and that also adds a mystery that keeps us on the edge until the last pages, which is the disappearance of a 10 year old who doesn’t have a conventional life. But why? A perfect page turner for this Sant Jordi, to be read by those who are avid readers and those who aren’t so much, because this novel can hook even those who don’t think of reading as their priority. Don’t miss it!