In a family shaped by their father’s gambling addiction, a man who swings between financial ruin and unexpected strokes of luck, Bruna grows up taking refuge in imagination, humor, and the stories she invents to make sense of the world. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, she discovers that the bonds she builds, especially with her sister Flora, are far stronger than the randomness that governs their lives.
Bruna grows up in a family where chance seems to decide everything. Her father, trapped in a gambling addiction he can never fully overcome, alternates promises, enthusiasm, and lucky breaks with crises that affect the entire family. Alongside her older sister Flora, she learns from an early age to navigate the contradictions of a household that is as unpredictable as it is full of life: long hours spent waiting in casinos, constant moves, impossible reconciliations, and arguments that can be as dramatic as they are ridiculous.
While her mother struggles to hold the family together, Bruna finds refuge in her imagination and in her relationship with Claudia, a globe-trotting aunt who sends postcards from around the world and introduces her to the pleasures of drawing, storytelling, and looking at reality with curiosity. Claudia represents the possibility of a wider and more adventurous life, so her unexpected death leaves a profound mark on Bruna, who spends years trying to find a way to live with her absence.
As she grows older, Bruna navigates shifting friendships, school conflicts, church youth groups, homemade séances, films made with friends, and countless plans that are as ambitious as they are absurd. Observant and creative, she transforms every experience into a story and every problem into an opportunity to imagine another version of reality. Gradually, she discovers that writing can be a way of understanding the world and finding meaning in what appears to be governed by chaos.
Meanwhile, family life continues to swing between extremes. After losing the family home and enduring serious financial hardship, her father wins a substantial amount of money through a football pool lottery. Suddenly there are trips, prosperity, and the feeling that life can begin again. For a time, the family enjoys an unexpected stability, but money fails to solve their underlying problems, and, as the years pass, the cycle inevitably repeats itself.
Amid changes, separations, and new beginnings, Bruna and Flora build a relationship that is at once conflict-ridden and inseparable. They fight, tease each other, protect one another, and stand together through the most difficult moments. Over time, that bond becomes the true emotional center of their lives.
Just when they seem to have found a new kind of balance, the sisters return home from school one day to find their mother dead from an aneurysm. Forced to face a situation for which no one has prepared them, they must organize the funeral, deal with practical matters, and decide how to say goodbye.
Determined to fulfill their mother’s wish to rest by the sea, they set out on a journey to scatter her ashes along the coast. Through arguments, memories, jokes, and confessions, the trip becomes a deeply personal farewell. Standing before the ocean, the sisters discover that growing up also means learning how to live with loss without losing the ability to play, imagine, and keep moving forward.
Casino Casa Grande is a story about childhood, family, and chance; a coming-of-age tale in which humor, imagination, and affection coexist with grief and loss, and where a young girl learns to transform the chaos of her life into stories capable of giving it meaning.
RELEVANT INFORMATION: Mariana Muscarsel Isla is an Argentine writer, psychologist, and artist. Her work, which spans novels, poetry, and essays, exists at the intersection of literature, feminist thought, and critical reflection. Her writing explores friendship, care, desire, identity, and forms of resistance from feminist and queer perspectives.
Casino Casa Grande is her literary debut, a coming-of-age novel that combines family drama with great sensitivity and everyday humor to portray the transition from childhood to adulthood within a family marked by addiction and instability. It is a story about loss, affection, and resilience that avoids falling into melodrama.
Its episodic structure, emotionally rich characters, and strong focus on family relationships offer considerable audiovisual potential, both as a feature film and as a limited series. The story skillfully alternates moments of tenderness, nostalgia, and tension while maintaining a distinctive visual identity, in the tradition of Aftersun and The Florida Project.
WHAT CRITICS AND READERS SAY
“A delightful novel, written with freedom and confidence, fresh, funny, and also deeply painful.” Gabriela Cabezón Cámara
“Mariana Muscarsel Isla disarms us with her natural freshness.” Goodreads reader review
AUDIOVISUAL POTENTIAL: TV Series, Limited Series, Feature Film, TV Film.
AVAILABLE LANGUAGES: Spanish.
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