Linde with her funny hats, Joram the Nintendo virtuoso, Ricardo and his foul mouth, Kevin wetting his bed, they all tumbled out of the statistics. If they fought against anything it was a fight against the idea that they suddenly weren’t normal children anymore. They looked forward to Christmas, made beautiful cards with the crafts teacher, they learned all the new countries of the Balkan, the indirect objects, about ruminants, carnivores, hectoliters and decimeters – useful knowledge. They learned to play piano, owned their own computers and then they died.

For two years Tom had to swap his nursery school for an alternative school. A small room of an university hospital. The children there didn’t have a fractured groin or inflamed tonsils, they had cancer. Short after his fourth birthday, Tom is diagnosed with leukemia.

In a flash his life is changed, as are the lives of his parents and his sister. Suddenly they’re living in the hermetically sealed life of the ill, where other rules apply and your view on future, death, past and love are changed.

Aleid Truijens writes crystal clear about this radical period that wasn’t all hardship. She uses a contemplative and light tone of voice with which she manages to avoid cheap sentiments and emotional kitsch.

‘A book about a great loss, written without becoming sentimental.’ – Vitaal.nl

‘For her style Aleid Truijens deserves all the admiration. Her lightly ironic and sarcastic style delivers beautiful sentences. While the illness of a child could easily lead to a sentimental description of all the misery, she is never tempted to do so. The book deserves a large audience.’ – Scholieren.com