MixedRain TaxiFerrante’s description of these and other tangled interrelations between individuals and families carries the flavor of intense adolescent emotion … Some readers may reach the end of this longish book wishing the narrator had spent more time exploring the political and academic controversies of post-war Italy, and less on the often squalid rivalries, infidelities, threats of violence, and general bad blood stewing in her old neighborhood, which sometimes call to mind low-budget Neorealist films of the era … In the end, Lenú’s gifts of observation and general decency compensate for occasional tiresome patches in the storytelling.
