Extraterrestre alla pari
(Au pair extraterrestrial) Book not yet available in English
Summary:
In the Olivieri family there is a special guest: Mo, from the Deneb planet. A boy or a girl? The “small” difference between Earthlings and Denebians, in fact, is that their sex becomes clear only when they are twenty! But this small difference generates big difficulties because, on earth, being male or female determines every aspect of life, from the games to play and the clothes to wear, to the friends that you can have…
Edited by: Centro MeTRa - Università di Bologna (Italy)
Comment:
This novel succeeds in making the readers laugh and think at the same time. Here Bianca Pitzorno shows the many contradictions and prejudices that are still present in the education of girls and boys, and how difficult it is sometimes to choose what you want to become when everyone tells you who you are. Thanks to Mo’s alienating and strange point of view, readers can see with different eyes what happens to them every day, that is how being male or female radically influences their lives. The open epilogue – or rather the epilogues, as the protagonists make different choices – conveys the message that there is not only one way of being, only one possible way, and that each person must find their place in the world and choose their own path. Pitzorno published this important novel for the first time in 1979, following the tenets of radical feminism, and today her work is up to date more than ever, in a period of deep genderisation of children’s culture. Unfortunately, however, it does not enjoy the same fame and fortune of other novels, perhaps because the latter are less ideological than this important book.