Following his refusal to comply during a lockdown drill, Noé is summoned to the principal’s office. Rather than returning to his classroom afterwards, he leaves the school and begins the story of this child who goes far away, without telling anyone, and who recalls his beloved grandmother, swept away the previous summer by a record flood of the St. Lawrence River. Of the woman’s house, now gone, only a pool of water remains where ducks paddle, and a recurring question in the boy’s mind: how do you keep from disappearing? In a notebook his mother gave him, Noé transcribes his sadness and expresses his anguish and guilt in one long, unbroken sentence, trying to find without ever stopping what it means to be a good human being.
With a rich dose of love and mischief, Mattis Savard-Verhoeven challenges us about a generation of children overflowing with life, but also anxious about everything and dizzied by human madness.
