Synopsis

Lisa is sixteen years old. She looks at the world as if she didn't belong there, and occasionally thinks unkind thoughts she's not ashamed of. She stopped eating because it seemed like a good way to finally disappear. After futile attempts at treatment, her parents took her to a home, Villa Erica. There she met three girls who suffer from eating disorders like her. Susi, fifteen, can't remember a day when someone didn't call her Fatty, nor a day when eating until she felt sick wasn't the only way to quell her unhappiness. Reda, twelve, with her light steps, began refusing food to please her ballet teacher, and continued until she almost disappeared into a sweater too big for her. Mat decided she wanted to be a bold, confident girl, always ready to make others uncomfortable, and she became just that, hiding her true self behind a memory. The days pass by in the same way, between petty disagreements and the hated mealtime, until Lisa accidentally knocks over one of the paintings hanging in the nursing home's hallway. Hidden behind the frame is a message signed by a mysterious anonymous person. But that message isn't the only one; there are others, and they all tell the story of a girl who desperately wanted to be normal, so much so that she invented a different life and kept it hidden behind those frames. Lisa thus begins a kind of treasure hunt inside and outside Villa Erica, from which she escapes with her three new friends to discover the truth about the author and, perhaps, find a new reason to fight with her classmates. Carolina Capria gives us a story that speaks to the girls we once were, the girls we now are, and the girls we will be. The Circumference of a Cloud is a novel about that moment in life when we just want to become invisible. It recounts the wounds we carry in our hearts and the hatred we know we feel for ourselves. And it does so with rawness, poetry, but above all, truth.