This is the second novel in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. It starts where the first novel ended and continues to follow the two girls’ friendship from Lila’s wedding day into their adulthood. Again, Lina narrates the story, but Lila figures as the center of her world. Lila has married young and moved up in the world. Not only is she a married woman, she is rich, at least by the old neighborhood’s standards. Her husband, Stefano, already owns two groceries and has just invested in a shoe factory in which Lila’s father and brother design their own brand. But the Solara brothers, with ties to the Naples mafia, are intimately involved as well. They seem to have their tentacles wrapped around every business opportunity in Naples, legal and illegal. By the novel’s end, Lila’s life has been turned upside down. Lila, despite being recognized as brilliant, quit school after eighth grade. Lina, meanwhile, through hard work and perseverance, is struggling her way through high school, learning to speak Italian without dialect, reading a daily newspaper for the first time, and is being introduced to people outside of the old neighborhood. The novel’s plot involves betrayals, love triangles, and much soul searching and inner angst. By the end of the novel Lila and Lena’s relationship has gotten even tighter and has become much more complicated. Lena has left Naples for Pisa, where she graduated from college, has become engaged to a bookworm philologist, and has had a semi-autobiographical novel published with the help of her fiancé’s mother. She has grown apart from the old neighborhood, but has she managed to truly escape it for good?
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