La supplente

Anna is 30 years old and does not get one right. Perhaps that is why she has not yet realized her dream of teaching; or perhaps it is because the road to obtaining a tenure-track position-is long and winding. So when she finds out that she has been granted a full-year substitute teaching position, she cannot believe her ears, and little does it matter to her that in that professional institution her beloved humanities subjects are not the most important. Anna is armed with good intentions, and no one will stop her from being the perfect Fleeting Moment-style teacher. However, when she is confronted with Rimmel, Bruzzo, Mito, the Prince, and Panik, her certainties waver: the new pupils’ nicknames may be nice, but they don’t seem so at all, and they have no intention of listening to her. But Anna has a secret strategy for trying to engage them: no textbook, no desk. Poetry is a language that reaches everyone’s heart, and even the Treccani dictionary, if used in search of the strangest neologisms, is not that difficult to consult. Day after day, she gets closer and closer to her students, discovering that, under a solid shell, they hide the fears of all teenagers. For them, friendship and love still have the dangerous but unique taste of naiveté, and, more than a grade, they need to be heard. What she never imagined was that they would be the ones to change her life. To teach her that her frailties are an asset and that her unexpected encounter with Sasha and her passion for chess is more special than she thought. Anna finally understood what the secret of teaching is: never stop learning.
Cristina Frascà is a teacher who decided to put the world of schooling at the center of her fresh and sincere debut. A novel in which the protagonist is in search of herself and never thought she would understand who she really is thanks to her pupils.