The girl who can do anything

By Edilasio Barra Junior

Every July, a boat comes up the river.

Bruna is fifteen and lives on a river farm in the Amazon, where her father runs three hundred hectares for an English owner he sees once a year. She knows how to read a river by the color of its water. She knows which stretch of forest you do not walk into, and why. She keeps a hardcover notebook of English words copied off a shortwave radio at night, with the translations written beside them in the handwriting of somebody still working it out.

This July the boat brings Alice, the owner's daughter, the way it has every July for eight years. It also brings three girls from a school in London, and by the end of the first night Bruna understands something she will spend the rest of the book turning over: everything she knows how to do is worth nothing here, and everything they know how to do is worth everything out there.

Then she takes them past the white trunk, into the part of the forest her mother forbade, and the day ends with a snake in the dry leaves and four girls walking backward in silence. Bruna gets all of them out using her mother's exact words. And the bill for that day is charged to her alone.

What follows is not a story about escape. It is a story about arithmetic - twelve seats on a plane, two hundred fifty-seven reais and twenty-five centavos for a passport, twenty-two nights of a mother sewing a dress on the other side of an ocean, four thousand pounds a year and a father working it out in pencil on the back of a diesel invoice. It is about a girl who counts everything because counting is the only thing she can do while she waits.

In February she flies to London. She learns that air can go to the other side of zero, that a whole city walks around letting smoke out of its mouth without finding it worth mentioning, and that a tree with no leaves is not a tree that fell. She sits in a science class where a number and a diagram have no accent, and hears a teacher say one sentence that becomes the instruction she carries for years: you can find it.

She also does something ugly, and knows it while she is doing it, and the book does not look away.

THE GIRL WHO CAN DO ANYTHING is a novel about a poor girl and a rich girl and the eight years of friendship that survive both of them finding out exactly what that means. It is about two mothers who each refuse something the other one offered. It is about the difference between a gift and a purchase, and how long it takes to learn to receive. And it is about four English words a girl chased for a year and a half because her dictionary gave her one - and the day she finally said them out loud, in a room on the other side of the world, to two people who had asked her the right question.

A story of a river, a notebook, and the exact price of a way out.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HJMRPPH5
• ISBN13: 9798173831484
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 183 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.4" x 6.0"