When we read the title of this book, we ask: what is the word? Could it be the same word that is the subject of those wonderful stories we’ve heard since childhood? Instead of this, the author gradually reveals to us the multiple meanings of the “magic word” by telling the story of stubborn Lucidio, who has long been at odds with his family and is brought back into the family fold by the loving presence of his grandson Pedro. We learn that although every magic word has extraordinary powers, in this story it is an ordinary word, so ordinary that it “wants to share life with others,” in other words, live with other words, with which it forms sentences, and the sentences form a story. And isn’t there magic in every story told? Because “when a writer knows how to tell a good story, he moves us, doesn’t he? It’s as if we are living other lives, the lives of the characters.”
