Reconstruction, is, above all, a book about the intoxication of existence, the intoxication of love. What miracle would allow the little girl, abused by her father from age 11, the 18-year-old handed over by her mother to a pimp who would put her on the street for four and a half years – years punctuated by episodes in the slaughterhouses where recalcitrant girls were sent… what miracle would allow her to finally discover the intoxication of life? (...) ‘‘What threw a wrench in the system, is that I fell in love, not just in love, but madly so. As soon as I saw the man whom I recognized the instant I laid eyes on him, I discovered inside myself something dating back to before I was defiled.’’ That sentence describes the instant that is undoubtedly the key to the whole book (...) This reconstruction is the luminous side of La Dérobade. Once again, we find the elements that made Jeanne Cordelier’s first book such a phenomenal success: the exceptional character traits that survived the dramatic events of her life: generosity, empathy, a complete absence of resentment towards those who made her miserable, and – and I choose my words carefully – purity and a capacity for love, as well as a sense of poetry that must surely have saved her from disaster in the past (...) Benoîte GROULT