The Story of the Lost Child (L’amica geniale #4)
By: Elena Ferrante
Format/Source: eBook; my purchase

Here is the dazzling saga of two women, the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery, uncontainable Lila. Both are now adults; life’s great discoveries have been made, its vagaries and losses have been suffered. Through it all, the women’s friendship has remained the gravitational center of their lives.

Both women once fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up—a prison of conformity, violence, and inviolable taboos. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books. In this final book, she has returned to Naples. Lila, on the other hand, never succeeded in freeing herself from the city of her birth. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect her neighborhood. Proximity to the world she has always rejected only brings her role as its unacknowledged leader into relief. For Lila is unstoppable, unmanageable, unforgettable!

Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous and a world undergoing epochal change, the story of a lifelong friendship is told with unmatched honesty and brilliance. The four volumes in this series constitute a long remarkable story that readers will return to again and again, and every return will bring with it new revelations.

If you follow me on Twitter, you probably saw me tweet a bit of my exciting in the hours leading up to the publication of this book. I had pretty much devoured the first three novels of this series back in August and preordered this book. So yeah, pretty much hovered over the internet midnight of September 1st, waiting for the confirmation that my purchase went through and the ebook was downloaded. I meant to read it a bit slowly, reading only the first two chapters…which became ten…which became a third of the book…Then finally I said what the heck and just read the whole book :3 Contains spoilers if you haven’t read any of the books in this series!

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Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (L’amica geniale #3)
By: Elena Ferrante
Format/Source: eBook; my purchase

In this third Neapolitan novel, Elena and Lila, the two girls whom readers first met in My Brilliant Friend, have become women. Lila married at sixteen and has a young son; she has left her husband and the comforts of her marriage brought and now works as a common laborer. Elena has left the neighborhood, earned her college degree, and published a successful novel, all of which has opened the doors to a world of learned interlocutors and richly furnished salons. Both women have attempted are pushing against the walls of a prison that would have seem them living a life of mystery, ignorance and submission. They are afloat on the great sea of opportunities that opened up during the nineteen-seventies. Yet they are still very much bound to see each other by a strong, unbreakable bond.

And here we are, the third novel in her Neapolitan quartet. Having zipped through the first two books in the series within a day, it seemed I did not slow down with the third book, even though the fourth one was on pre-order and wouldn’t be released until September (now). Nonetheless I had to find out what happened next in Elena and Lila’s story. May contain spoilers ahead, especially if you haven’t read the previous installments!

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