As Maria Velasco tells us in the prologue, Alicia. So Big and So Small gives us access to a courtyard where there is a “garden suffocated by time, a jungle that envelops everything.” The garden symbolizes the place of inner growth. But Alicia, as we know, according to Manel’s title, grows and shrinks, thus revealing that identity is an unfinished and unlimited process. Alicia is not here the adorable girl from a well-off family, but the daughter, on the way to adulthood, of a working mother, for whom her grandparents act as babysitters and more.