I'm Not Scared [Hardcover]

Niccolo Ammaniti (Author), Jonathan Hunt (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 2003

The hottest summer of the twentieth century. A tiny community of five houses in the middle of wheat fields. While the adults shelter indoors, six children venture out on their bikes across the scorched, deserted countryside. In the midst of that sea of golden wheat, nine-year-old Michele Amitrano discovers a secret so momentous, so terrible, that he dare not tell anyone about it. To come to terms with what he finds, he will have to draw strength from his own imagination and sense of humanity. The reader witnesses a dual story: the one that is seen through Michele's eyes, and the tragedy involving the adults of this isolated hamlet. The result is an immensely powerful, lyrical and skilfully narrated novel, reminiscent of Stephen King's Stand By Me.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This gripping American debut by Italian novelist Ammaniti captures well the vagaries of childhood: the shifting alliances, the casual betrayals and the mix of helplessness and earnest audacity with which children confront adult situations. Nine-year-old Michele Amitrano lives with his little sister, devoted mother and distant father in a rural Italian hamlet consisting of five dilapidated houses. In the sweltering summer of 1978, he and a group of his friends strike out on their bikes across the barren, scorched hills. While exploring an abandoned house, Michele discovers what he believes to be the dead body of a boy his own age. He cannot bring himself to tell his friends. When he tries to tell his father, the elder Amitrano brushes him off. Drawn back to the site, Michele discovers that the boy is not dead, but weak, disoriented and unable to account for his presence there. Michele brings the boy food and water and slowly learns more about him. The boy's story-which includes kidnapping and ransom-are too much for a nine-year-old to fathom and involve virtually every adult in the tiny community. Yet Michele decides that he must do something to help the boy. Part mystery, part morality play, the novel is written in simple, spare prose. The characters, particularly that of Michele, spring to life, and the story builds to a heart-stopping climax. Readers will find this accomplished work hard to put down and even harder to forget.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New Yorker

Ammaniti is one of Italy's most acclaimed younger writers, and this carefully constructed thriller is the first of his books to appear here. During a piercingly hot summer, a few kilometres from a bone-dry hamlet in rural Tuscany, a shy, nervy, nine-year-old boy called Michele explores a derelict house and discovers, under moldering leaves, a horrifying secret. The novel is saved from sensationalism by Ammaniti's almost cinematic ability to conjure detail—the look of scraps of meat on a plate, the sheen of a new bike, the whispers of adults in the night—and by his utterly convincing re-creation of a child's perspective, as Michele's discovery propels him into ever more uncertain territory.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Canongate Books (February 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1841952974
• ISBN-13: 978-1841952970
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,076,874 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A modern day parable, October 7, 2003

By 

Jessica Ferguson "threelittlebirds" (Woodbury, NJ) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: I'm Not Scared (Hardcover)

Told through the thoughts and views of a young boy, I'm Not Scared is a searing look at the struggles and truths of childhood morality, the formidable situations many children's parents force them to face, and the untimely death of childhood trust and safety. Jonathan Hunt has translated Niccolo Ammaniti's disturbing story beautifully, capturing the hard realities of desperate and self-righteous people along with the sinister and surreal atmosphere that slowly descends around Michele and his family. A difficult book to discuss without revealing plot lines and endings, Ammaniti has, in an unusual sense, written a compelling psychological thriller and has created a story that does not end with the printed page but within the reader's own imagination.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Non avere paura di crescere, December 2, 2003

By 

Andrew Rasanen (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: I'm Not Scared (Hardcover)

I, too, read the novel in Italian and have not seen the English translation. In Italian, at least, it's an intelligent, well crafted, exciting story with beautiful language and some real edge-of-your-seat scenes. The immature perspective of the unsophisticated, underinformed boy Michele (remembered by his adult self, who narrates) is very believable. I liked how the concept of not being afraid is inserted in several different aspects, among more than one character. The contrast between the seemingly pristine surface world of endless golden wheat and the filthy conditions inside the dark hole in the ground creates a perfect metaphor for a story that, in the end, is about not being afraid to grow up, for that is what Michele does, voluntarily leaving behind the innocence of childhood to enter the shadowier moral world of "i grandi," the grownups. The novel has been made into a movie in Italy that I saw recently on DVD. Like most movies, it simplifies the plot and alters the ending somewhat, but it follows the novel fairly closely. The all-important role of Michele was well cast, and the vast dreamy landscape was made a virtual character in the story.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Some real life in 70s Italy, October 27, 2003

By 

Vittorio Caffè (Italy) - See all my reviews

This review is from: I'm Not Scared (Hardcover)

Loose ends? Where? Obviously I read the novel in Italian--being Italian myself--and loved the book. Now I'm glad English-reading people may read it and posslibly love it too. The novel is tight and has a perfectly wrought plot mechanism. Ammaniti does not explain everything, but on a second reading all that was not explained becomes clear. But what is important is the atmosphere of those years, when all those of us (Italians) who lived in rural areas felt that living there meant being imprisoned in a medieval world, and that everything good was to be found in big cities. That feeling is wonderfully rendered in the novel and that's what I like most. As for kidnapping yeah, it was a major industry for some regions of the Deep South (namely Calabria) and yeah, sometime whole smalltowns or villages were involved. And then the vipers, well, what's the problem? We don't have rattlesnakes and copperheads in Italy (luckily!), so everybody knows the only dangerous snake is the viper--and that's the snake everybody knows and is afraid of. Anyway, enjoy this novel... it is much better than Benigni's stale comedy, or musty stereotypes of mandolin-playing captains...