Stepping into a Ferrante book is always like stepping into a world where women's anger is on the surface and not hidden down. And I love it. Because she writes from first-person, the anger and attitude is clearly visible to the reader but not to those other characters in the story usually. That's something I've always liked about Ferrante's writing, that her protagonists are always feeling something that is not necessarily on display to everyone else... much like many women feel every day, because we have to be A Certain Way... (whether it's the #coolgirl or the perfect breezy mom or... you get it). This is why Ferrante is so great. And this book is good, and I will always read Ferrante, but it decidedly comes before her amazing work in the Neopolitan series. There are certainly foreshadowing elements of the Neopolitan Quartet (Lena, the beach, the doll are all motifs repeated in her later work...), but the translation sometimes is a little odd and took me out of Ferrante's powerful prose.