Defeating Dystopias Through a Tale of Courage and Unity

The Children of the Night by Andrea Appetito published by Lamantica Edizioni (pp. 266, euro 20 is the story told in the first person of a little girl, whose name we do not know, who in the course of the novel becomes a young girl whose age we will never discover. At the beginning of the narrated events we meet her trying to attack the "Ship" on which her father should be, who she imagines is a prisoner of the "guardians". She is not alone in trying to carry out this mission, with her are "the Children of the Night" who give the title to this novel, that is, a gang of boys and girls who have decided to behave as if they were a family, but in reality they are orphans of different parents: "no one in the City had brothers or sisters, they were all only children. I was too". The protagonist lived with her mother, in fact, but when the woman dies she decides to run away to avoid ending up in an "Institute", where all children without parents or those who deserve punishment are locked up.

THE USE OF EXPRESSIONS such as: «the City», «the Ship», «the Institute» clearly indicate that with this latest novel by Andrea Appetito we are faced with a dystopian text in which the geographical and temporal contours are undefined, but there are elements that suggest a setting in the future. For example, when the protagonist escapes from the «City» she is found by a girl older than her, Beauty, who helps her and takes her to her parents who live on the river and collect the waste that literally invades the watercourse, seeing: «behind the miserable appearance of a waste, beauty and from the waste of the world a new world is born».

Unfortunately, the parenthesis of family happiness found thanks to Beauty's mother and father does not last long, because these two adults are also killed and the two girls find themselves having to survive, together with the other "Children of the Night" who are completely supportive of the protagonist and are willing to do anything to help her find her father. To do so, they carry out several "assaults" on the "Ship", with their canoes, buying gunpowder from the "Old Man" who sells it in exchange for enormous quantities of food.

ON THE «SHIP» LIVES the other narrative voice of this story: the «Commander». The novel alternates, at least up to a certain point, the story of the little girl and that of this man, whose words are indicated in italics in the text. We then discover that he is in charge of an enormous vessel of which we know nothing, except that it is inhabited by the enemies of the protagonist and that it is destined to be abandoned by those who should take care of it. The pages of the «Commander» diary are in fact increasingly desperate, as time passes.

Hope in the novel is clearly in the hands of youth, therefore of the "Children of the Night", but also of the little girl that Beauty will give birth to, without anyone knowing who the father is, and that she decides to call "Niger", like the river that flows in the land where her parents were originally from. Helping the girl reach the hospital where she can give birth to her little girl are the protagonist of this story and another little girl, Leila, the character to whom Appetito entrusts the message of the novel: "stories of courage and unity, stories of justice. If we believe, they grow and become adults and then nothing can stop them, not even death".