Two girls, unequally placed.

Mia has everything she wants and knows it. She performs it, too, parading her imported pencils and small domestic victories. The other girl barely registers, bullied by being unacknowledged, made to feel her own presence is so faint she almost slips out of the category of “person.”

Around them, the classroom runs on its own logic of no adults, no intervention—just children organising themselves into brutal hierarchies. Then the unnamed girl begins to write things into her classmates’ notebooks after school—small, intrusive sentences that don’t belong. It feels minor. It isn’t. 

A teacher—who may or may not be the author—wakes from a dream that seems to contain the entire first half. Years later, she encounters the girl again. Definitely not a “fairy tale” and definitely a study in neglect, authorship, and the violence of childhood.

Graywolf Press paperback (2017, English translation by Janet Hong). Very good condition. Light shelf wear, clean pages, no marks.