Luca, a 14-year-old boy, sees his life completely change when Betta, the girl he loves platonically, is murdered.
To Have Loved You So Much, a novel that recalls terrible and high-profile cases such as the Circe massacre, accompanies the young man through his adolescence and the forging of his identity. The tragedy that opens the novel (Betta’s rape and murder at the hands of Minzio, Luca’s brother) will mark the entire family and Luca himself, who will be forced to move to Milan to live with his uncles, leaving his parents behind.
Roberta Recchia’s novel traces a path of mourning, that of Luca and of his entire family. The family must rebuild its identity and create new, happy memories despite the pain that pierces them and their entire community.
Roberta Recchia has written the novel about the other victims that an atrocious crime leaves behind. It is a text about people whose lives were left suspended, lives that we often do not revisit and that are hard to reopen. The author turns her gaze toward these collateral victims, marginalized by society because of their fraternal bond with the killer, to narrate, through an emotional coming-of-age novel, Luca’s transition into adulthood, a shy boy who is reborn from the shadows as if the passage of time and forgiveness allowed him to live a life whispered.
To Have Loved You So Much narrates in the third person the life of a family condemned to ostracism but that finds redemption at the moment when both victims and perpetrators and witnesses of those duels are able to express what they feel, leaving behind the awkward years filled with silence that followed Betta’s murder.
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Author: Roberta Recchia. Title: To Have Loved You So Much. Translation: Maribel Campmany. Publisher: Duomo. Available from: Todos tus libros.