earlyandalone 's review for:

The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante
4.0

This book was a really tough read for me. The first few chapters echoed with a lot of thoughts and feelings I'd had when I experienced my own abandonment, but then Olga, the narrator, loses her grip on reality, literally trapping herself, her two young children, and a sick dog inside their apartment. It's claustrophobic, frenzied, and frantic. Not ideal to read on an airplane, for instance, which I did.

In the end, I enjoyed this book because Ferrante does what she does best: lays out human emotion starkly, free of judgment and sentimentality.