Silver Skin — Javier Calvo

When he's twelve, Pol has a breakdown where he becomes a recluse, gets obsessed with the fiction of cult sci-fi author Cooper Crowe, and ends up stabbing a classmate in the neck.Two years later, he is doing much better. Or is he? While waiting in the clinic for his twice-a-week therapy session, he meets eighteen-year-old Bronwyn. Notably sophisticated, defiantly strange, and unspeakably violent, Bronwyn is a very different kind of outcast. Whereas Pol has elevated evasion to an art, Bronwyn is waging a frontal war against society and the world. She barges into his life like a supernova. And, as they say, nothing will ever be the same again for Pol. But no, this time it's for real. Nothing will ever again be the same.For three months that feel like a lifetime, Pol follows Bronwyn into a fast-spinning maelstrom of amphetamines, dark music, and even darker teenage philosophy. She brings him to an underworld where he is transformed into her willing acolyte. She appears and disappears like a magical being, which is what she is in Pol's mind. In his search for shining Bronwyn, Pol's allies are Oli, his older sister and opposite; their ever-absent mother, armed with her hermetic wisdom; Cooper Crowe's books; the writings of mystical poet Juan Eduardo Cirlot; and the music of a band that may or may not be Nazis.Silver Skin is a coming-of-age story about the magical powers of adolescence, a kind of intensity that can never be retrieved once we leave those years behind. It is about delving into the dark side and realizing that the dark side was always the side of light—and that everyday life is actually much darker. It's about never believing what they tell you is right. And, above all, it's an elegy to the transformative powers of art, imagination, and the imagined other.