Filippo, Me and the Cherry Tree

After losing her sight, thirteen-year-old Mafalda tries to protect the friendships and routines that still give her independence in Filippo, Me and the Cherry Tree by Paola Peretti. Filippo remains her closest friend, while her cat Ottimo Turcaret accompanies her through daily life. Yet the arrival of a difficult girl at school unsettles Mafalda’s confidence, especially when that classmate appears interested in Filippo. At home, her father has lost his job and withdrawn into depression, leaving Mafalda to face a problem she cannot solve through optimism alone.

The novel treats blindness as part of Mafalda’s life without reducing her to a lesson in courage. Her growing feelings for Filippo, experiences of bullying and first steps into adolescence sit beside grief and anxiety about her family. The cherry tree functions as a place of memory, shelter and possible renewal, linking this story to Mafalda’s earlier experiences while allowing the book to stand on its own. Peretti’s restrained first-person perspective keeps the emotional scale intimate: uncertainty arrives through ordinary conversations, silences and changing loyalties. The result is a hopeful coming-of-age story whose warmth does not erase frustration, jealousy or loss.