After tackling the taboo of menstruation in It’s beautiful, red (The short scale, 2021), Lucia Zamolo is interested, in this second children’s book, in a much more common theme – not to say overused: the sorrows of love. The author and illustrator uses the codes explored in her first book to offer an illustrated album halfway between a diary and a documentary. In a frontal and current language – which is similar to an exchange between friends -, it intersects personal and humorous anecdotes with explanations on the physical, psychological and neurological reactions of the broken heart. The elaborate and lively illustrations, like the typography, give the impression of opening the pages of a school diary in which a teenager has given free rein to her creativity between two math lessons. Offering nothing really new from the point of view of the discourse, the book will possibly not convince a young person in the heart of a heartbreak of the positive impacts of his bereavement. It does, however, have the merit of normalizing and validating the emotional roller coaster he is going through. Who knows, he might even get her first smile!
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