Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“Her quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite.” (CBR11 Bingo)

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, Ann Goldstein (Translator)

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Friends, I really tried with this one. This story should work for me. Check out this Goodreads summary: “The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else. As they grow, as their paths repeatedly diverge and converge, Elena and Lila remain best friends whose respective destinies are reflected and refracted in the other. They are likewise […]

How the Other Half Lives

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I revisited this book for class, and while the language and visceral imagery remained the same this time as it did on my first read, I was struck this time by just how much the theme of education ran through this story. For a general recapping of the story, here’s the amazon blurb: “Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Ferrante’s four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its protagonists, the fiery and unforgettable Lila, and the […]

Re-reading Elena Ferrante Part 1

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I will write up one review for the whole series. It’s not really a winter break kind of set of books because it takes place in southern Italy, but I was able to get the audiobooks from Overdrive and felt like I had it in me to reread this series. This is narrated by the same reader who narrated Elena Ferrante’s nonfiction collection Frantumaglia which means fragments (kind of) and that collection is just a brilliant set of interviews (questions sent; answers sent back) and a […]

An impressive depiction of a complex friendship spanning decades

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I’m going to begin by including a brief summary of each of the individual books in the series, before reviewing all books as a whole, as I don’t think it’s possible for me to talk about my reading experience and impression of these books individually. My Brilliant Friend We are introduced to the two protagonists of the series, in our narrator Elena Greco (also sometimes called Lenuccia or Lenu) and her best friend Raffaela (called Lena by most people, but Lila by Elena). As with […]

The Review of the Great Books

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I really, really liked Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which is an incredibly blase way to compliment a book so raw and confrontational and, well, brilliant. The remaining three books in the Neapolitan Novels series build on the strong momentum established by the first and, in the process, continue to be some of the most poignant reading I’ve experienced in ages. The feelings that these books provoked in me were strong and visceral, inflamed and tender in their ebb and flow. These are not feel-good […]

The clues to her identity are….

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not contained in this children’s novel. A few weeks back someone reviewed the weird train book from Stephen King’s The Wastelands that provides a creepy atmospheric mythos to the journey at the heart of the longer novel. In a strange way, this little children’s book, which you COULD conceivably read to children if you wanted, does the same thing. Three things that Elena Ferrante writes a lot about are lost kids (metaphorically and literally), dolls, and shoes. This book has all three, but the lost child […]



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