With her new novel, Don't Forget to Live, novelist Ann Napolitano delivers a great book about resilience and returning a child to life after unimaginable drama.
In 2010, a plane from South Africa to London crashed in Libya. Only a 9-year-old boy survived, immediately becoming an object of fascination in the media and on social networks. A news item that the American novelist Ann Napolitano took up with great delicacy to write Do not forget to live. A fiction whose hero, Eddie, is a 12-year-old child, the sole survivor of a flight from New York to Los Angeles. Among the 190 passengers and crew who died in the Airbus A321 crash, the boy’s parents and brother. In the aftermath of the accident, the one his loved ones called Eddie became Edward. A change of first name that means there is, and always will be, a before and an after.
At each chapter start, a date anchors the story in two temporalities. On the one hand, Edward's new life, with his uncle and aunt who took him in and do everything to support him, and on the other the passengers' final hours until the crash. But the author does not succumb to sensationalism any more than she sinks into macabre descriptions. The reader knows from the start that the passengers on the flight are doomed. Yet they all have the right to speak. A very young woman who finds out about her pregnancy, a wounded soldier, a young wolf of Wall Street, a businessman with cancer. Ann Napolitano gives them flesh and substance. Men and women whose lives, made up of little joys and great sorrows, also deserve to be told. Just as Edward will slowly shed his survivor's clothes and learn to exist outside of the drama, the ordinary passengers of this extraordinary flight are not defined by their tragic end.
Very skillfully, Ann Napolitano also delivers a critique of this society in which everyone has an opinion on everything, where the life and the tragedies of an individual become a common good that can be talked about on social networks. But the miraculous little one, whose extraordinary luck the world praises, struggles with invisible demons. He struggles to see a chance in his personal tragedy of which everyone seems to want a part. At 12, Edward isn't quite a child anymore. He stands at the dawn of adolescence, in this strange in-between where an individual so needs those who love him to build himself. But Edward no longer has a mother, father or brother. The young boy is as if “prevented”, a normal life is forbidden to him. He walks, talks, goes to high school, but he's outside of himself.
It’s only at the cost of superhuman efforts and with the help of her young neighbor Shay that, little by little, the noises in her head will stop. He will find the desire to eat again, the desire to sleep, the desire to love again. For Shay, he is "the one who survived". A Harry Potter of flesh and blood, whose miraculous survival is a sign of a magic it is up to him to discover. “No one can hurt you anymore. Never. You have already lost everything. She tells him with an honesty that is precisely what he needs. Between the two young people, a unique relationship will be forged, which will lead them down unexpected paths. Don't Forget to Live is also a great romance novel. Because if it is in yourself that you find strength, you never heal alone.
Don't forget to live, Ann Napolitano
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