Free Day
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2.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A haunting and powerful portrait of a young French girl, and her desire to escape the world in which she is born, without losing her identity
In the marshy countryside of southwestern France, fourteen-year-old Galla rides her battered bicycle twenty miles, twice a month, from the high school she attends on scholarship back to her family’s rocky, barren farm. Galla’s loving, overwhelmed mother would prefer she stay at home, where Galla can look after her neglected little sisters and defuse her father’s brutal rages. What does this dutiful daughter owe her family, and what does she owe her own ambition? In Inès Cagnati’s haunting and visually powerful novel Free Day, winner of the 1973 Prix Roger Nimier, Galla makes an extra journey one frigid winter Saturday to surprise her mother. As she anticipates their reunion, she mentally retraces the crooked path of her family’s past and the more recent map of her school life as a poor but proud student. Galla’s dense interior monologue blends with the landscape around her, building a powerful portrait of a girl who yearns to liberate herself from the circumstances that confine her, without losing their ties to her heart.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A teenage girl struggles with loyalty to a family that mistreats her in Cagnati's skillful, heartrending novel, her English-language debut. Intelligent, willful, and fierce, 14-year-old Galla grows up on an unprofitable farm in southwest France, where her parents contend with "land filled with white stones, all these daughters and never any money for anything." Her father is often violent, and her loving, depressive mother is resentful when Galla becomes a boarding student at a Catholic high school, where she's ashamed of her hand-me-down clothes and disgusted by the other students and "idiotic" teachers. Over the course of one freezing weekend, as Galla takes a lonely and arduous bicycle journey to visit her mother, she reflects on the tragedies of her childhood and her dreams of earning enough to buy her family "earth far away from these pallid hills and wild waters," unaware that her world is about to change irrevocably. Galla's interior monologue unspools as she cycles, gradually revealing the daily miseries and notable occurrences of her life. Like Holden Caulfield, she's critical of adult hypocrisies, resenting "godmothers never give us anything," but alive to the possibilities of the natural world. Readers will be invested in this young woman's demand for dignity: "I wanted, all of a sudden, to rise up all alone against the world and demand at last: What had I done, that nobody wanted me?"
