Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Ferrante) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Nothing you read about Elena Ferrante's work prepares you for the ferocity of it. And with each new novel in her revelatory Neapolitan series, she unprepares you all over again…Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is the story of a furious friendship, and the internal violence suffered by two women set against the turbulent landscape of a fractured Italy…this is a woman's story told with such truthfulness that it is not so much a life observed as it is felt. The reader is ransacked and steps back into the world gingerly, with lingering questions about estrangement and belonging.
Amy Rowland - New York Times


Elena Ferrante is one of the great novelists of our time. Her voice is passionate, her view sweeping and her gaze basilisk. Her subject is the domestic world, and part of her genius lies in her capacity to turn this sphere into an infernal region, full of rage and violence, unlimited in its intellectual and emotional reach. Ferrante's view of family life is anything but sentimental, anything but comforting. In fact, her writing is remarkable for its velocity and ruthlessness. Reading her is like getting into a fast car with Tony Soprano: At once you are caught up and silenced, rendered breathless, respectful…In these bold, gorgeous, relentless novels, Ferrante traces the deep connections between the political and the domestic. This is a new version of the way we live now—one we need, one told brilliantly, by a woman.
Roxanna Robinson - New York Times Book Reviewbb


[Those Who Leave] is a book of evidence, the effects of the past told, never shown, and yet it remains compelling, visceral and immediate. The past's touchstones and many characters who have appeared in the previous volumes are alluded to often, but the book stands alone, gallantly becoming for the reader what it is for Elena Greco—an exercise in remembering.... [The novel] is as expansive and broad as it is intimate.... Those Who Stay is a tour de force. I don't want to read anything else.
Jennifer Gilmore - Los Angeles Times


(Starred review.) Surpassing the rapturous storytelling of the previous titles in the Neapolitan Novels, Ferrante here reunites Elena and Lil..., who dissect subjects as complicated as their own relationship, including feminism and class, men and women, mothers and children, sex and violence, and origin and destiny.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Rising far above the melodrama of a typical coming-of-age story... [with] keen intellectual curiosity and heartfelt passion.... [T]his tour de force shows off Ferrante's strong storytelling ability and will leave readers eager for the final volume of the series. —Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH
Library Journal


(Starred review.) [The author] approaches her characters' divergent paths with an unblinking objectivity that prevents the saga from sinking into melodrama.... Ferrante's lucid rendering...illustrates both that the personal is political and that novels of ideas can compel as much as their lighter-weight counterparts.
Kirkus Reviews