Two years before he left home, my father told my mother that I was very ugly - this is how, in a snappy sentence, the intense novel by Elena Ferrante, author of The Genius Society, opens. From here the snowball begins to roll that generates the entire book, and leads us from the casual sentence uttered to the father - a sentence that changes the whole world of his 12-year-old daughter - to the future tsunami of the disintegration of the family and the painful years that follow, years in which Jobna, the narrator, will become , from a child embraced by her family to a sober mature girl, in which her answers to the question: what am I and what kind of person can I be, will change frequently. Until that moment, Jobna was a fat girl, the daughter of intellectual parents from the heights of the refined elite of Naples, who adored her father, who only gave her confirmations and reinforcements. His traumatic statement ignites an obsession in her to meet her confiscated aunt Vittoria, to whom her father compared her. Inspired by her aunt, who lives in the underbelly of Naples, Giovna is driven to expose the hypocrisies, lies and betrayals in the lives of adults. Her new look stirs up a whirlwind of lies and fantasies in her and pushes her to disruptive actions. Throughout these years, the events of the book have been accompanied by a bracelet from a bed of disasters that passes through the family in crooked ways. Will Jobna be able to drop this bracelet from her life? Ferrante managed to create here not only a mesmerizing and addictive story, but an entire world into which she pours, with supreme emotional intelligence, turbulent mental states.
