The Last Tornado

Mag has a thousand reasons to run away from home. But she hasn’t yet reckoned with friendship and the miracle of first love.

Mag is sixteen and has a prosthetic right leg that forces her to use a crutch in order to walk. After her father’s death, she lives with her ex-mother and her husband, the pastor of a Christian sect convinced that the world is about to end. She has no friends and doesn’t intend to make any: all she wants is to leave home and, while she’s at it, Alabama, just like her brother Dan did. One day, thanks to an anonymous flyer, Mag discovers that, very near her, someone intent on running away from home is looking for company. It’s the chance she’s been waiting for. Mag thus joins a kind of club for loser teenagers who, just like her, dream of a future far from Cedarville. Soon enough, Mag, Reb, Grace, Sav, Allen and Scott become inseparable. When no one thinks about leaving anymore, the disappearance of Mag’s stepfather triggers a series of events that will force the girl to leave Cedarville, right when, paradoxically, it’s the last thing she wants.

• An intimate and choral story that starts like an imperceptible breeze and ends like a tornado, in a succession of events that will change the fate of the protagonists.
• A novel full of energy suspended between hope and cynicism, in which the discovery of friendship and the miraculous force of first love transform the want to run away into a desire to stay, the temptation to destroy into the need to build.
• A protagonist who, despite the huge challenges she’s faced aged just sixteen, is determined to take her destiny into her own hands, ending up also changing that of the people who, over the course of the story, she’s learnt to love.
• The frank and disenchanted voice of a teenager who’s grown up too fast and who, almost despite herself, learns to look at the miseries of the adult world with sincere compassion.
• A genuine and combative look at disability, which can embrace both physical and social limits.