I don't know if I'm for marriage. That's why I keep running around the streets – a man's breath is like when a blacksmith's bellows blows, reaching out for you and able to touch your body." It's the year 1960, Olivia Denarová is fifteen years old, living in a small Sicilian village, and has known since childhood (because her mother, obsessed, keeps repeating it) that "a woman is a jug – whoever breaks it, keeps it." She loves studying and learning difficult words, runs until she can barely catch her breath, secretly redraws the faces of movie stars into her notebook (even though she can't go see a movie because "then a person just has bugs in their head"), goes with her father to collect snails, and shoots stones with a slingshot at those who mock her friend Sara. She dislikes the idea of having her period because from then on she won't be able to do all this and will have to defend herself against men to reach the wedding unscathed. When the system in which she lives, which silently witnesses the oppression of women, forces Olivia to agree to abuse, she rebels and exercises her right to choose. However, she will pay for her "no." The writer masterfully transforms history into a story and depicts the contradictions stemming from love between father and daughter, between mother and daughter, narrating the ambiguous desire that both flatters and terrifies, especially...
