Lila and Lenu's complex friendship/rivalry continues into their late adolescence and early adulthood in this second volume of Ferrante's awesome, feminist series set in post-war Naples. Their bond, forged on a shared recognition of one another's high intelligence and intellectual abilities, which surprisingly to everyone appeared in these two girls born into a traditional poverty stricken neighborhood to uneducated families where school attendance after middle school is rare, is one of iron that can withstand the repeated blows born of immense frustration and insecurities which they apply to it.

Lila, married and forced to be done with formal schooling as a teenager, is tortured by her circumstances. She is supremely incapable of substituting the role of grocer's wife and mother for the role of student and intellectual that she was born for, and her fierce will ensures her suffering.

she had been increasingly oppressed by an unbearable sensation, a force pushing down harder and harder, crushing her. That impression had been getting stronger, and prevailed. Raffaella Cerullo, overpowered, had lost her shape and had dissolved inside the outlines of Stefano, becoming a subsidiary emanation of him: Signora Carracci.

But she will desperately try to keep her true self alive, with apparently self-destructive choices and outcomes.

Lenu, conversely, escapes. She wins a scholarship to a university in Pisa, studies, immerses herself in intellectual life, and graduates, despite her fears of inadequacy based on her background, with a bright future.

I wasn't yet twenty-three and I had obtained a degree in literature with the highest grade. My father hadn't gone beyond fifth grade in elementary school, my mother had stopped at second, none of my forebears, as far as I knew, had learned to read and write fluently. It had been an astonishing effort.

Lenu has always felt that, at their cores, Lila is the smarter and would have done even better than she. And that in compensation for being frustrated in this, Lila has always sought to outdo her wherever else possible, despite their friendship and alliance. One of Lenu's first impulses after receiving her degree illustrates this central dynamic of the series:

I felt a desire to find her and measure the distance between us now.

That distance, sadly, is vast, at least at this point in time. It's a brutal comment. Now I can't wait to see where the third volume in the series takes Lila and Lenu. These characters are deep, complicated and vivid, and their struggles and actions compelling. The writing is detailed, sharp and just so on point. The translator deserves serious applause for bringing these novels into the English reading world with the same immense qualities that they evidently carry in Italian. ( )

Reading this is like having someone who is a subpar storyteller catch you up on drama from a different group of friends of theirs: it’s entertaining, and may even teach you something, and you wanna hear how it all ends, but the fact that you’re being held at arms length the hold time creates such a separation from you and the material that it’s impossible to fully become immersed. ( )

Our narrator, made omniscient from her place in the current day, reflects on her history with equal parts affection and mild horror.

The storytelling moves quickly, with emotion effectively separating what mattered and what didn’t (there are three deaths in as many minutes, but we can spend more time than that reflecting on a single isolated night after feeling betrayed). This device works well for young women navigating their intelligence and education, but largely without anyone they trust to advise them.

The loneliness and fragility of social (im)mobility are depicted over and over again through new lenses, and again we are left with a powerful final image to haunt us until the next book in the series. 6/10 ( )

When reading the first installment of this series I immediately got behind both Elana & Lila, two young girls coming of age in the slums of Naples. In this installment they are in their early 20'ies and, again and again, I found myself dismayed by the life changing mistakes they made. Most of these mistakes involved men. Sorry to all you Italians out there, but let's face it. Most of these men were creeps. And while Elana and Lila had there differences, they always stood behind each other ; and so do I. Making mistakes is part of the process of growing up, and i'm counting on both of these strong & determined women to learn from their mistakes and make the best out of their lives. To be continued... ( )

It took me a long time to read this, but it was not a slog. Rather, it is such a densely detailed story of two women growing up with entwined lives, it was almost like I physically couldn't read it quickly. So the story of Elena and Lila continues, with Elena continuing on the path to education and the intellectual life, and Lila settling into the life of a married woman. Sometimes I had to pause and remind myself that these are the lives of teenagers! Neither Elena nor Lila has an easy path. Elena is constantly wracked with self doubt, and Lila's pervasive and somehow seemingly misplaced arrogance, maybe a sense of entitlement, sets her ultimately down a path that leads somewhere other than into happiness. By the end of the volume each woman seems to have found an uneasy peace, yet if history serves, their lives and their relationship will hold many more twists and turns in the future. ( )