Ed's Reviews > My Brilliant Friend

As with Days of Abandonment, I was impressed by Ferrante’s emotional intelligence, her ability to create characters that are complex, self-limiting, driven by needs and desires that are often contradictory and opaque even to themselves. Their relationships to each other are equally complex: loves and friendships are fundamentally imbalanced, built on competition, and fraught with uncertainty and self-doubt. She captures wonderfully the ignorant confusion of childhood and adolescence, the struggle to find one’s way, the overwhelming influence of environment, and the difficulty in seeing beyond one's circumstances – constraints which are made starkly apparent though the senseless violence of a culture driven by honour and retributive justice. There is so much about the human condition generally and this stage of life particularly that she captures perfectly.

My Beautiful Friend has the flavour of an introduction to a larger story. I am engaged and will read on in anticipation.