PanLiterary Review (UK)While Ferrante is generally committed to depicting the choking complexities of family history, the binaries here are cinematically simple. Vittoria and co are Neapolitan Starkadders, smothering, folksy and volatile. Giovanna rebels, through slum-going defiance, unkindness to her mother and sexual near-misses that disgust her. The poor little rich girl starts speaking dialect. One further plotline is brilliantly funny: Giovanna is instantly infatuated with Roberto, the vaunted escapee who studies in Milan ... weirdly, Giovanna seems like the stone nymphet of a middle-aged man chipping out his own nubile Galatea ... This single-minded and sometimes coruscating novel catalogues with exactitude the body and brain of its heroine. The characters are erratic, cloying, manipulative and enmeshed. But the experience is disappointing ... Giovanna feels like a fantasy of what teenage girls should be ... Oscar Wilde wrote in A Woman of No Importance that ‘children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.’ Giovanna cannot get past the second stage; I could not do the equivalent with this book.
