Reviews with content warning for Sexual harassment - My Brilliant Friend

Little women but in Italy and queer!

This was such a beautiful book—so easy to get lost in the prose and fully immersed in the story. This was such an incredible reflection on childhood, and more specifically, girlhood. I’m always impressed by books that can follow a character from a young age and have an accurate a reasonable voice for the character while still making it an engaging read. I am eager to read more by this author and truly beautiful work by the translator!

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augie_'s review

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challenging dark emotional sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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detectivemoo's review

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emotional reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

‘Angela’s Ashes’ but Italy, plus ‘Pride and Prejudice’ but between friends, with a teeny tiny sprinkle of ‘Brooklyn’. It’s honestly as perfect and example of character driven book as it gets.

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izzy_v's review

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dark reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? N/A
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

Content Warnings

miller8d's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

This book is brilliant in a way that makes me say “This is the story of a real life,” not “omg I love this book.” Like, I don’t really feel like I read a fictional story. (I actually have no clue if it’s autobiographical or not but I won’t google it because I don’t want to spoil it). Perhaps for that reason, this book took me an incredible long time to read. Like, months on end of picking it up and loving it, but being unable to pick it up again because it was so difficult to read. I don’t even think it was actually difficult literature for me, but instead so emotionally dense and detail-heavy that I couldn’t pay anything but 100% attention while reading, otherwise I’d have to go back dozens of pages to figure out why I was confused. Also,

this is perhaps the only book or story I’ve ever known which accurately depicts how tumultuous and confusing and painful it can be to survive childhood and grow up. I absolutely loved her depiction of how the child’s mind can equally spin fantasy and horrific terror on the same coin— not simple boogieman stuff, but much scarier, finding awful and disturbing fears in/around the mundane figures of your social world and daily life, even when there’s nothing truly wrong there.

Beautiful book.

Content Warnings

serena_hien's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

Content Warnings

lisafagerlind's review

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emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No

3.75

a little bit of sexual absuse and violence

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