The actress revisits the themes that are dear to her and envelops them with an immense dose of tenderness and hope.
Those familiar with the tragic and painful literary world of Sylvie Drapeau may be surprised to find her in the children’s section. Her first youth novel, Escarpoletteis certainly, like his previous works, crossed by shadows, but finds – in the beauty of small things, the surprise of a burst of laughter and the discovery of a passion – the power to resist grief.
Rose spends her evenings in the hospital, immured in silence, since a serious bicycle accident plunged her mother into a coma, making the future uncertain. In the hope of extracting her from her silence, her grandmother gives her a diary, in which she can record and read aloud what she wants to say to her mother.
At first, Rose reveals herself timidly. But when she attends, with her father, the play Little Red Riding Hood, she is dazzled. The spectacle is grandiose, so much so that her mother seems to be holding her hand and witnessing this great thunderbolt with her. She feels the urgency to tell him everything. Now determined to become an actress, the little girl convinces her teacher to accompany her students in the preparation of a great theater; an adventure where lessons, emotions and challenges will follow one another, gently teaching her to let go of what she cannot change.
In this first volume of what is announced as a series, the actress and writer takes up the themes that are dear to her – mourning, resilience, the power of family ties – and wraps them in an immense dose of tenderness and hope, almost as if she were kneeling at child’s height to whisper in his ear these sweet words: “you are not alone”.
She dissects, in a style that takes on the starkness and naivety of childhood, the contradictory emotions that accompany the loss of a loved one, of a beacon whose beam we must now imagine. It recounts pain, fear and anger, but also those bits of sunshine which lift a corner of the curtain of fog to slip through, at first incongruous, then accepted and celebrated, in the great dance of life which continues, despite everything.
His Rose, although she has to go through an exceptional ordeal, remains authentic, above all thanks to the candor of her doubts, her fears and her contradictions. As in this charming scene, where she asks her motionless mother to answer her by wiggling her little toe, before being stopped in her tracks: can you still make jokes when someone is in a coma?
Escarpolette is also an ode to the theater and to words, which become, through the pen of Sylvie Drapeau, vectors of meaning, reminders that it is the passions that make it possible to move forward, to grow, to regain control, sometimes, over this which eludes reason.
The book, sensitive and deeply touching, will perhaps shock the little more sensitive souls, so well does it capture the vertigo of reality. Otherwise, it is an ideal tool to support a child who is grieving or to deal with the possibility of death. From the stuff of the embrace.