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| All That is Red
| | Anna Caltabiano
| If you could choose a world without loneliness, without shame, grief, misery, or feeling of any kind, would you, if it also meant that you lost the simple pleasure of a picnic on a sunny day or the joy of falling in love? Would the allure of a comfortable numbness prove too tempting to resist? Could you choose between feeling pain and not feeling anything, ever again? A girl is caught in a world where this choice is fiercely contested. In the cross-fire between the Red and White empires, the feeling and the unfeeling, each bent on the other's destruction, the girl must choose between emotion and oblivion, joining the ranks with the Reds as they fight to resist the Whites, but all the while struggling with her own desperate ambivalence. All That Is Red is a story of survival and a journey through the human condition, revealing how the intimate euphoria of pain can sometimes be all we have to remind us that we are alive. Anna Caltabiano is fifteen years old. She was born in British colonial Hong Kong to a Japanese mother and an Italian-American father, before moving to Palo Alto, California; the mecca of futurism. Her writing explores and exposes an adolescent dystopia in which accepted traditions, religions, cultures and communities have been eroded, resulting in a lost generation consumed by social apathy and self-loathing which has found solace through electronic connections. Unsettling, engaging and surprisingly erudite, All That Is Red is a remarkably assured debut from an ascending literary star.
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