From the beginning, the reader can read this book. The paratexts are very clear, because in addition to what the title suggests, the cover of Unai Arana explains the idea of mistreatment.

We have him in Kazabo, and this is how we have mentioned him in others, the writer most likely to experiment in Basque children’s and young people’s literature. In terms of style, how to narrate the plot, the narrator’s vision, the tendency to use different resources... also in terms of topic. This time, as previously mentioned, the well-known writer offers us a work on the subject of maltreatment or gender violence.

“My mother is getting better every day. The first visits were very hard, but lately I see it quite well. A better face and a clearer and clearer voice.” This is how the novel begins, and as the reader sees it, we have the daughter of the main protagonist as the narrator. We have Enara, a eighteen-year-old girl, a storyteller who will tell us little by little about what happened to her mother, but also about the difficult situation she has to live with her younger brother at home. In fact, the mother is in the hospital after being beaten by her father, but as suggested from the beginning, in this fight the mother kills her father and this last incident is not accepted by Enara’s brother. “Why have we run out of parents?” the young Lukáš asks, “when we get angry we all start the session, girl. And it would have been normal for my father to be

angry once in a while.” In the plot, on the other hand, there are two more men, Enara’s boyfriend, who is willing to help, and Erramun, an old acquaintance who now wants to start a relationship with Enara’s mother. All this explains the possibility of different feelings, attitudes and behaviors, but with little evolution between the protagonists, that is, the protagonists are quite flat.

In this sense, we must accept the commitment to write a novel on such a subject, the dialogue and the debate that can be generated by the different perspectives and behaviors of this type of situation, but I would also say that this in itself favors a relatively simple reading of the text.

Recently, Iban Zaldua wrote “against juvenile literature” that purposeful books for young people can harm literature and instead rebuke classical literature for young people, “perhaps he won’t fully understand the book (...) but he would begin to guess what literature really is.” Just as this work by Kazabón has required a commitment and effort on the subject, I do not believe that, in literary terms, it succeeds in the development of the story and its protagonists.