PositiveThe Times (UK)Elena Ferrante’s long-awaited new novel kicks off with the line: \'Two years before moving out, my father told my mother I was really ugly.\' And it does not let up, showing time and again how men can be feckless, vain, deceiving shits ... Ferrante shows again how she is unbeatable at pulling you inside the mind of a teenage girl, making you see how everything that looks irrational from the outside — the moods, the silences, the jealousy, fears, tears and resentments — are utterly logical and reasonable ... The book does sag in the middle, when Vittoria temporarily vanishes — the years pass, and you start to miss the spark between Lila and Elena and the historical canvas of the Naples quartet of novels ... However, the pace picks up in the final third, thanks to the rising, overlapping tensions in the lives of the women who start to orbit around Giovanna ... Giovanna’s growing resilience and her discovery of one man she can put on a pedestal carries the book as it picks up speed with a flurry of denouements right to the last page. This book gives the world a new Naples heroine and a hint that another quartet of novels might be in the works, as well as showing that five years on Elena Ferrante can still deliver.
