El verano de Elia no es tan divertido ni fantástico como el verano del resto de sus compañeros. Tiene que estudiar y, por si fuera poco, le toca soportar a la nueva novia de su padre. Elia quiere ganar un poco de dinero extra y es por eso que se dedica a pasear los perros de la gente de su barrio. Realizando este trabajo, Elia descubrirá una organización secreta que gana dinero con las peleas de perros. Y también descubrirá el valor de la amistad, del amor, de la honestidad.
Care Santos has written this novel for young readers, using one of the trendiest subjects for youngsters at present: virtuality. Two teenagers meet in a chat room on the Internet and they agree to meet to see each other’s faces. But this meeting doesn’t take place until the end of the novel, when the main character enters a virtual world without noticing. Coming out of this world will be as difficult, if not more complicated, as meeting Krys.
Alexandra is a Catalan girl, descendent from Ukrainian. She is told to be funny, her friends love her even though they don’t always understand her whims, a bit unusual for them. This fact makes her feel different from the others. She seeks for loneliness in order to enjoy her likings. Reading, throwing chewing gum to the roof or Björk music contribute to create her own world where she can feel herself. A friendship with an Argentine girl with a hard past will shake her life, above all when she let her discover a Web site of bookcrossing, a web site where people free books to make possible that others find them. Both of them meet a strange character that, after announcing it in the Web, he leaves books of the Argentine poetise, Alejandra Pozarnik, in the cafés of l’Eixample (a Barcelona’s neighbourhood). Reading this poetise will change the Alexandra’s way of looking the world. Trying to find who was that character will lead her to discover who really is her new friend.
What to do when nobody seems to understand you? What to do when you know you belong to another world? What to do when your home become the worst of all prisons? Those are the questions Álex is asking, while trapped in a broken family. Her mother, an unhappy and bitter woman, who is always criticising Álex; her father is always absent and absorbed in his job to avoid the familiar chaos; and her elder brother takes any opportunity to despise her.
Álex is drowning in an oppressive and hypocritical reality. Álex needs to breathe, needs to defend her ideas without breaking down in tears, needs to believe in something else. Only her friend Irene and the arrival of Huari into her life, a young Moroccan immigrant, may bring the stability she is yearning to have.