White Like Milk, Red Like Blood — Alessandro D'Avenia

The riveting story of a young love forced to confront deathBy turns brilliant and irreverent, deeply moving and touching, Alessandro D'Avenia's debut novel is an international literary sensation that has been translated into two dozen languages and has sat atop the Italian bestseller list for three years. This mesmerizing coming-of-age story recounts an adolescent's discovery of suffering, fear, and death, and offers readers the powerful and intensely poetic answers he comes to find. Leo is an ordinary sixteen-year-old: He loves hanging out with his friends, playing soccer, and zipping around on his motorbike. The time he has to spend at school is a drag, and his teachers are "a protected species you hope is going to become definitively extinct," so when a new history and philosophy teacher arrives, Leo greets him with his usual antipathy. But this young man turns out to be different. His eyes sparkle when he talks, and he encourages his students to live passionately, to follow their dreams. Leo's dream is a girl named Beatrice, the prettiest in school. Beatrice is irresistible-one look from her is enough to make Leo forget about everything else. But when he learns that she has leukemia, he is forced to search within himself, to bleed and to be reborn. In the process, he comes to understand that dreams must never die, and he finds the strength to believe in something bigger than himself.