Marton-Ady Edina - Pubi

What's it like to be a teenager if you can't count on your parents, if you're more mature and brave than them? What is it like to go from a city to a village and immerse yourself in silence? What is it like to be a woman who wants independence in a wild macho environment? What is it like to grow up in one summer? What is it like to be free in a suffocating, burning community full of secrets, where the school cannot be a refuge and the library is the only window to the world? What is the price of this inner independence? What is it like to love and lose?
Pubi is a girl's novel, but it is not rosy and hopeful, because it shows all the painful truths, without analyzing or exclusively thematizing anything. The book of bruises and the book of deliverances. It hurts to read and it's good to read. As the title character says of her own life: "This is not a girl's novel. I can't turn the pages forward." We don't turn pages either, because everything here has weight and significance, for peeled potatoes as well as caramel milk, dissected dandelions or red patent leather shoes. We will be witnesses and accomplices, victims and sinners - there is no escape, we are also in it, we are overwhelmed by the terrible tension of the desire to be silent and speak out. "They all knew. They knew what was happening to us."
This is a beautiful, accurate, cruel, tender, passionate and restrained, virginally sensual novel, a story of loneliness and silence, broken love, fatal friendship, love and longing. You have to read it all the way through, because we are also burning with desire and curiosity. We move forward with bated breath, with perfectly devoted attention, from the most ordinary moments to tragedies, we feel on our skin everything that the narrator experiences, whether it is a punch or a hug, a touch or hunger, a kiss or terror, while a single question pops up in us, which only the complete a novel can be answered and redeemed: "How could I remain silent?" (Anna T. Szabó)