The story, set in 2024, is told by Akim, a boy who writes about his eight years spent in a very particular school.

The plot seems a little confusing at first glance as the protagonist retraces his memories with the reader, but despite this it is possible to understand the progression of the story.

The protagonist is twelve years old when he has to leave his family to start attending this mysterious school where children are sorted according to their abilities and potential.

Akim and his friend Semyon are very excited and happy to start attending the courses, while their friend Ninel appears very scared and skeptical.

Here they spend their eight years studying and having fun, and time passes quickly, slowly revealing the strangeness and manipulations that lie behind a seemingly normal environment. 

Only at the end will the protagonists meet a person who will prove indispensable as the bearer of an unexpected truth.

I would describe this book as very intriguing, mysterious, unexpected, and full of twists and turns that no one would ever expect at first.

I also found it interesting from a psychological point of view, being a book that makes you reflect a lot on our future but also on our present.

The story is told by the narrator protagonist who writes the events of the eight years spent in a school in the future: we are in 2140.

Akim is 12 years old and has to start his first year in this school where the kids are selected based on their psychological type and to this end, before starting their studies, they are subjected to various tests, precisely to evaluate their potential.

The protagonist and his friend Semyon are thrilled at the idea of ​​leaving their family to go to the institute, while their friend Ninel is a little less so, perhaps already aware of what the distortion and manipulation of psychology can conceal…

The school years pass and friends grow, between classes and parties; they see time pass faster than they expected.

Akim likes to recount his memories and reflections as they emerge, following a very vague chronological order, and this allows the reader to understand how the story unfolds.

Only at the end will the soul of another character bring to light the truth that the protagonist and his group of friends never understood or to which, perhaps, they did not give the right importance. 

"The Alphabet of the Mind" is a well-written and easy-to-read book; the story is engaging and enjoyable, and the treatment of psychological aspects is particularly interesting.

The book is a sort of diary that recounts the experience of a boy named Akim who, like all the boys in his village, as a teenager is locked up in a "school" to ensure that he conforms to the will and thoughts of the current political regime.

The boy explains how they are divided into groups and then into classes based on their twelve-year-old aspirations and their character, according to psychological tests they have to take during the admission process.

Each character trait is identified with a letter and based on the group they belong to, lessons are held to master their characteristic personality traits and kill their dreams and aspirations.

The text conveys the protagonist's sense of imprisonment, as he often wonders how different people can belong to the same group just because they answered the same questions on a test. He argues that this is a reductive way of identifying individuals.

The reader is encouraged to continue reading because he senses the desire for rebellion that develops in some of these kids who understand how the social system is trying to take away their freedom of thought.

However, I was disappointed by the ending because I thought that the protagonist, together with some companions the story tells, would somehow manage to escape from this system.

I found the story difficult to follow because it often switched from one topic to another and, at times, at the end of a sentence, it was not clear whether the events had really happened or whether they were the imagination of the protagonist-author: Akim.

The Alphabet of the Mind is the debut novel by fantasy writer Silvia Lodini, which showcases her introspective and psychological analysis of the human mind.

This is a science fiction novel in which the author leads us to a school in the future, in 2140, whose purpose is to categorize human beings and eliminate their originality and personality. Students are divided into different sections based on their characteristics, where they will be put to the test and forced to reflect on themselves and their role within a community.

The main protagonist, Akim, narrates his experience within this school, where he lives with kids who, like him, question the purpose of school itself. Especially in the final part of the novel, the school appears like a kind of prison from which escape seems impossible, and the story is shrouded in an aura of doubt and mystery.

The author, who bases her narrative mainly on dialogue, manages to capture the reader, engaging them and leading them to ask the same existential questions as the protagonists.

Reading this novel helps us question ourselves about something that concerns us closely: our future.

Through Akim's story, the author transports us to a world different from the one we know today, destroyed by nuclear power and then rebuilt, immersed in a constant winter cold. In this world, even the perception each human has of himself has changed due to government-imposed laws that classify individuals with alphabetical letters based on their psychological type. At the age of twelve, the protagonist and his friends find themselves training within the CSA facilities of the Bond (their state, opposed to the Federation).

Through a succession of thoughts, characters, and stories, Akim tries to organize his mind and clarify some of his doubts, ultimately discovering a world of lies and contradictions. If at first everything seemed new compared to the reality we live in, we change our minds and discover that events, behaviors, and feelings are as constant in this future as they are in our present. Heroes, beliefs, and divisions fall, but the awareness of a repeating history remains: sooner or later, something will change, the people, classified and deprived of every form of art and beauty, will rebel and start a new war.

Throughout the narrative, we remain enthralled by Akim's unfolding mind, which leads us from a state of total confusion to the final decision to await the freedom that will be achieved only with the destruction of the "Training and Sorting Centers." This introspective novel keeps the reader in constant suspense, completely unsettling them with an open ending that leaves them wondering what will happen to this great hero, who doesn't feel like a hero like every other teenager.