The Loonies Strike Back

Written by Pierdomenico Baccalario

224 pages

Age 11+

All rights available

  • awardPremio Letteratura Ragazzi di Cento Shortlist

A story of friendship, sport, kindness, and what it means to be free.

Agnese—whom everyone calls Steno—is thirteen in the summer of 1982, the magical season when Italy, led by Paolo Rossi and Enzo Bearzot, will win the World Cup. But it is also the summer when her uncle Arturo Praz, known as “Legend,” decides to play his own match, gathering his old friends to challenge the asylum nurses on the day of the final.
Arturo, Bones, Mario, Bobi, and the others share a past as patients of the “College,” the city’s psychiatric hospital, and owe their freedom to the revolutionary, compassionate doctor Franco Basaglia.
Riding through the streets of a vivid, captivating Trieste on her uncle’s Vespa, Steno follows the adventures of this unlikely team, whose fate she discovers is intertwined with that of the Italian national team. In their quest for redemption, they bring onto the field anger, fear, hope, and the spark of their lives—proving that “different” and “normal” often mean the same thing.

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