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What Members Thought
Loaned to me by my brilliant friend Margaret Leef.
What a difficult book to review! Ann Patchett warned us that the first part could be tough going and it was, at least for me - I would read ten pages and then immediately fall asleep. However, as she recommended I stuck with it and gradually became enthralled with the story of Lila and Elena (called Lenu) - in this volume (the first of four) we follow them from childhood to age seventeen. The book is set in the 1950s in a poor neighborhood in Si ...more
What a difficult book to review! Ann Patchett warned us that the first part could be tough going and it was, at least for me - I would read ten pages and then immediately fall asleep. However, as she recommended I stuck with it and gradually became enthralled with the story of Lila and Elena (called Lenu) - in this volume (the first of four) we follow them from childhood to age seventeen. The book is set in the 1950s in a poor neighborhood in Si ...more
Read again 09/28/16 in anticipation of reading book two.
What a pleasure to read something new and wonderful. A coming of age story of two girls from the poor side of Naples, what they share and how their lives diverge. It is about long-lasting friendship. A character study of great insight.
Recommended.
What a pleasure to read something new and wonderful. A coming of age story of two girls from the poor side of Naples, what they share and how their lives diverge. It is about long-lasting friendship. A character study of great insight.
Recommended.
I mean I guess I am glad that I finally read this, but it was super unsatisfying and I have zero interest in continuing the series. I enjoyed the second half more than the first, but oof there are so many characters and the coming of age story was repetitive and slow.
After 150 pages, I stopped reading. I didn't dislike it per se but there was nothing really engaging about it either. There was no real plot structure, just character development. I thought it would be more about Italy and feel like an escape but it could have taken place anywhere. I kept waiting for it to get more interesting but it just didn't. I have too many other things I want to read so I let this one go.
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I tried. Really I did. We picked it for book group because it was so popular and highly rated. None of us finished (I'm pretty sure I had the least patience; only made it about 10% in).
I didn't find anything to latch onto. Couldn't figure out what the storyline was trying to be and kept feeling like it had to be a bad translation.
Others in the group thought the friendship was codependent/abusive and objected to the portrayal of women as having a limited outlook and being random victims of viole ...more
I didn't find anything to latch onto. Couldn't figure out what the storyline was trying to be and kept feeling like it had to be a bad translation.
Others in the group thought the friendship was codependent/abusive and objected to the portrayal of women as having a limited outlook and being random victims of viole ...more
I was really looking forward to this but couldn't get into it after a few hundred pages.
...more
Really loved the depiction of Lena and Lila's postwar childhood in a poor neighborhood in Naples. It didn't quite grab me as much as I was expecting based on reviews but definitely going to check out the next book in the series.
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Dec 04, 2015
Deedee
marked it as to-read
Jul 14, 2016
Allie
marked it as to-read
Oct 18, 2016
Kate
marked it as to-read
Aug 30, 2025
Melissa Wiebe
rated it
really liked it
Shelves:
historical-fiction,
fiction,
literary-fiction,
coming-of-age,
2025,
elena-ferrante,
friendship
