A PEN RICH IN HOPE AND FEELING.

There are differences between writing for adults and writing for children.  They have in common the eternal, great questions of life, which run through all written stories: love, war, death, friendship.

 What changes is the gaze that the children’s authors place on love, death, war, friendship.  Because it is the gaze that contains the child’s point of view.  One of the differences  is in the language.  Children’s literature has a universal language, because it can speak to adults and children.  On the other hand, it is always the journey that counts, not the destination.

 Can the encounter with a book be decisive?  Of course yes.  A story is crucial to illuminate shady areas to which we had not given meaning, to search for new words within ourselves: and it is the words that build thought, each new word we name is a piece of reality that we discover, invent, free  .  It has happened to many of us in adolescence that reading a novel seemed to us an important part of our future.  And it is not a case.  At that age a book touches the threads that carry the current inside an emotional and cognitive universe that is slowly forming.  These are the new words you were waiting for, they are the different points of view that no one had ever enlightened.

  I am convinced that all children’s novels are coming of age novels.  A children’s book puts into action a process of narrating the world that becomes a real path of sentimental education.  Even irony, lightness, fantasy literature, that of love, I find that they can have a formative value in a positive key.  The important thing is that they are books capable of words that remain, that amaze, that know how to fall into the heart and into the soul, hinting at unexplored worlds within themselves.  Another difference stands in the endings.  Until a few years ago, there was mostly happy ending in children’s books. Now, the things are changing. Indeed, the beauty of certain books has nothing to do with the ending, but is given by the power of the feelings it generated throughout the course of the story and by the messages contained. 

In my opinion, whatever the theme and whatever the ending of the story, one thing that should never be missing is hope, even if it is hidden between the lines.