Reading Club: Teenage Literature | Light on a Black Sky

In February, the SNFCC Teenagers’ Reading Club continues its meetings, facilitated by comic book artist and translator Thanasis Petrou as facilitator. Books of his include: Giannoulis Halepas. The Myth of Modern Greek Sculpture (on a script by Dimitris Vanellis, Patakis Publishers, 2019); Gra-Grou (on a script by Tassos Zafiriadis and Yannis Palavos, Ikaros Publishers); At the Battle of Marathon (Patakis Publishers, 2015).

The book we will be reading together this month is , Light on a Black Sky by Eleni Priovolou. 30 Book Club members, aged 12 to 16, take a cue from this delightful mystery novel and engage in conversation, creating and discovering new worlds through the book's pages.

Don't worry if you haven't been able to read the entire book, or if you’ve missed our previous meeting. Each month, the Reading Club facilitator, Thanasis Petrou, will be giving us a new cue, announcing the book that we will all be reading together over the weeks to follow. At the end of the month, the group of people who have read the book (or at least half of it) will be meeting to exchange thoughts, impressions, feelings and concerns, triggered by what we have just read, whether we liked it a lot or not so much.

The plot

Dinos, a 10th-grade student, lives with his family in Athens, Greece. He loves mathematics, and he was among the top students of his class until his parents became unemployed. Due to the lack of financial resources, the family now gets by with great difficulty, living in a home with no power or heating, feeding on little and bad-quality food. Poverty causes a shift in the behavior of Dinos’s parents. Fights break out on a daily basis, and at some point, the constant bickering between them escalates to physical violence on the part of his father.

The family environment has no more love and affection to offer Dinos and his little sister; it has become stifling.

Dinos wishes to escape this oppressive situation. Sad and hurt, he is looking for a way out in the outside world, in the city, walking through its streets, looking to find his place. There he comes across and hangs out with homeless people, immigrants, and a group of school kids who have formed a music band called “The Free Besieged” and hold their rehearsals in an abandoned ice factory. 

In a world that is changing for the worse, Dinos believes that “if everyone betters themselves, then something might change.”

An award-winning book about faith in a cause, and the fostering of love and solidarity.

The author:  

Eleni Priovolou was born in Angelokastro of Messolongi, where she lived until she turned 18. She studied Political Science at Panteion University. She has published twenty-three books for children and teenagers, eight novels for adults, one novella, and one collection of short stories. Her adult novel As I Wanted to Live (Kastaniotis Editions, 2009) was honored with the Readers’ Award of the National Book Center of Greece (EKEBI) in 2010. She has been awarded the “Big Children’s Award” of Diavazo magazine for her book To synthima (2009). Her book Light on a Black Sky (2021) won the Greek State Prize for Adolescent-Youth Literary Book; it was listed among the 200 best youth books according to the International Youth Library in Munich, and was included in the IBBY Honor List for 2022.
 

A few words about the Reading Club facilitator:

Thanasis Petrou was born in 1971 in Thessaloniki. He studied French Literature in Thessaloniki and Paris, and holds a postgraduate degree in Sociolinguistics. In 2002, he won the first prize in the comic book competition (“New Talents” category) organized by “9” magazine of Eleftherotypia newspaper in collaboration with the AKTO School of Art & Design. From 2002 to 2005, he studied on a scholarship at the Sketch, Comic Book & Cartoon department of AKTO. He has worked as a French teacher, a translator, an illustrator, a musician. From 2005 to 2011, he worked with "9" magazine of Eleftherotypia newspaper. Since 2012, he has been teaching at AKTO. From 2008 to 2022, 16 comic books of his have been published by various publishers, both on scripts of his own and on scripts by other authors (Dimitris Vanellis, Katerina Servi, Pavlos Methenitis, Tassos Zafiriadis, Yannis Palavos et al.). His latest book is: “1923: Hostile Homeland” (Ikaros Books, 2022).

Sunday 19/02
13.00-14.30

ΖΟΟΜ

For children aged 12 to 16
Free admission with online pre-registration

Pre-registration starts on 01/02, at 12.00

To participate in the Reading Club, it is necessary for those who hold a position to have read the book of the month. (It is also useful to have it with them).

Eleni's Priovolou book Light on a Black Sky is available in Greek by Kastaniotis Publications.

As part of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center's collaboration with the National Library of Greece, the book for the Reading Club has been chosen by NLG staff members.