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LiterarySara

Literary Sara

What I've been reading on the trolley. 

Currently reading

Salt Fish Girl: A Novel
Larissa Lai
A Place of Greater Safety
Hilary Mantel
Make Art Make Money: Lessons from Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career
Elizabeth Hyde Stevens
Moby Dick: or, the White Whale
Herman Melville
My Brilliant Friend - Ann Goldstein, Elena Ferrante

I picked this up at a used book sale about a week before the storm over the possible revelation of Ferrante's identity. I am still thinking about whether or not I care who the author "really" is, but the controversy reminded me to read the book. Which is extremely masterful: precise and detailed yet fluid and absorbing. Minutely observed psychology, arresting narrative that kept me reading. 

 

But for most of the book, even though I couldn't put it down, I kept asking myself whether I loved the book. It's so well crafted, I thought to myself, but is this a book that I'm going to keep thinking about when it's done?

 

But the final chapters, culminating in the high tensions and dramas of a wedding in their fractured small town, simply blew me away. And two weeks after I finished it, I can say definitively that I have not stopped thinking about it. I love this book, although I love it with a slow burn rather than the rapid flare I associate with a good story.