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My Brilliant Friend
- The Neapolitan Novels, Book 1
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
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Is anyone else overwhelmed by the amount of content hitting screens both big and small? Luckily, you can't really go wrong when one of your favorite listens gets adapted for television or film. Bookworms, film buffs, and couch potatoes alike will delight in these upcoming adaptations of bestselling, fan-favorite books. Whether you like to listen before you watch or save a richer literary experience for post-viewing, you'll want to keep these titles on your radar.
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One of Soseki's most beloved works of fiction, the novel depicts the 23-year-old Sanshiro leaving the sleepy countryside for the first time in his life to experience the constantly moving 'real world' of Tokyo, its women and university. In the subtle tension between our appreciation of Soseki's lively humour and our awareness of Sanshiro's doomed innocence, the novel comes to life. Sanshiro is also penetrating social and cultural commentary.
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This story had no point.
- By icelandicponies on 12-30-21
By: Natsume Soseki, and others
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The Parisian
- By: Isabella Hammad
- Narrated by: Fiona Button
- Length: 20 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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A masterful debut novel by Plimpton Prize winner Isabella Hammad, The Parisian illuminates a pivotal period of Palestinian history through the journey and romances of one young man, from his studies in France during World War I to his return to Palestine at the dawn of its battle for independence.
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Overly ambitious
- By Placeholder on 06-16-19
By: Isabella Hammad
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My Life as a Rat
- A Novel
- By: Joyce Carol Oates
- Narrated by: Sadie Alexandru
- Length: 13 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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My Life as a Rat follows Violet Rue Kerrigan, a young woman who looks back upon her life in exile from her family following her testimony, at age 12, concerning what she knew to be the racist murder of an African American boy by her older brothers. In a succession of vividly recalled episodes, Violet contemplates the circumstances of her life as the initially beloved youngest child of seven Kerrigan children who inadvertently “informs” on her brothers, setting into motion their arrests and convictions and her own long estrangement.
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Heavy Topics & Satisfying Story
- By Oscar on 06-30-19
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Pages for You
- The Pages for You Series, Book 1
- By: Sylvia Brownrigg
- Narrated by: Abby Craden
- Length: 6 hrs
- Unabridged
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In a steam-filled diner in a college town, Flannery Jansen catches sight of something more beautiful than she's ever seen: a graduate student, reading. The 17-year-old, new to everything around her - college, the East Coast, bodies of literature, and the sexual flurries of student life - is shocked by her desire to follow this wherever it will take her.
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A gorgeous listen
- By MissLynn on 03-09-20
By: Sylvia Brownrigg
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Martin Eden
- By: Jack London
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 14 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Martin Eden, Jack London’s semiautobiographical novel, is about a struggling young writer. It is considered by many to be the author’s most mature work. Personifying London’s own dreams of education and literary fame as a young man in San Francisco, Martin Eden’s impassioned but ultimately ineffective battle to overcome his bleak circumstances makes him one of the most memorable and poignant characters Jack London ever created.
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My favorite Jack London book.
- By j daly on 11-26-14
By: Jack London
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Black Sunday
- A Novel
- By: Tola Rotimi Abraham
- Narrated by: Liz Femi, Dele Ogundiran, Miebaka Yohannes, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Twin sisters Bibike and Ariyike are enjoying a relatively comfortable life in Lagos in 1996. Then their mother loses her job due to political strife, and the family, facing poverty, is drawn into the New Church, an institution led by a charismatic pastor who is not shy about worshipping earthly wealth. Soon Bibike and Ariyike's father wagers the family home on a sure bet that evaporates like smoke.
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Good Story - Awful accents
- By Tamara C-J on 02-15-21
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The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna
- A Novel
- By: Juliet Grames
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 16 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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For Stella Fortuna, death has always been a part of life. Stella’s childhood is full of strange, life-threatening incidents - moments where ordinary situations like cooking eggplant or feeding the pigs inexplicably take lethal turns. Even Stella’s own mother is convinced that her daughter is cursed or haunted. When the Fortunas emigrate to America on the cusp of World War II, Stella and her sister, Tina, must come of age side by side in a hostile new world with strict expectations for each of them.
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Misogyny at its worst
- By brenda on 01-15-20
By: Juliet Grames
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The Godmothers
- A Novel
- By: Camille Aubray
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan, Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Meet the Godmothers: Filomena is a clever and resourceful war refugee with a childhood secret, who comes to America to wed Mario, the family's favored son. Amie, a beautiful and dreamy French girl from upstate New York, escapes an abusive husband after falling in love with Johnny, the oldest of the brothers. Lucy, a tough-as-nails Irish nurse, ran away from a strict girls' home and marries Frankie, the sensuous middle son. And the glamorous Petrina, the family's only daughter, graduates with honors from Barnard College despite a past trauma that nearly caused a family scandal.
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Easy Enjoyable Read
- By Bunny on 06-23-21
By: Camille Aubray
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Two Crosses
- Secrets of the Cross, Book 1
- By: Elizabeth Musser
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
The glimmering Huguenot cross she so innocently wears leads her deep into the shadows. When Gabriella Madison arrives in the French village of Castelnau in 1961 to continue her university studies, she doesn’t anticipate being drawn into the secretive world behind the Algerian war for independence from France. And the further she delves into the war efforts, the more her faith is challenged. The people who surround her bring a whirlwind of transforming forces.
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Faith, Romance, Spies, and Fascinating History
- By Amazon Customer on 05-02-19
By: Elizabeth Musser
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City of Girls
- A Novel
- By: Elizabeth Gilbert
- Narrated by: Blair Brown
- Length: 15 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Beloved author Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction with a unique love story set in the New York City theater world during the 1940s. Told from the perspective of an older woman as she looks back on her youth with both pleasure and regret (but mostly pleasure), City of Girls explores themes of female sexuality and promiscuity, as well as the idiosyncrasies of true love. In 1940, nineteen-year-old Vivian Morris has just been kicked out of Vassar College, owing to her lackluster freshman-year performance.
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A strong story
- By Anita Kristensen on 06-08-19
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The Shadow Lines
- By: Amitav Ghosh
- Narrated by: Raj Varma
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Opening in Calcutta in the 1960s, Ghosh’s radiant second novel follows two families - one English, one Bengali - as their lives intertwine in tragic and comic ways. The narrator, Indian-born and English educated, traces events back and forth in time, through years of Bengali partition and violence, observing the ways in which political events invade private lives.
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Narrator Doesn't Know How to Pronounce
- By Amazon Customer on 08-27-11
By: Amitav Ghosh
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What Storm, What Thunder
- By: Myriam J.A. Chancy
- Narrated by: Ella Turenne
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
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Story
The Earth had buckled, and, in that movement, all that was not in its place fell upon the Earth’s children, upon the blameless as well as the guilty, without discrimination. At the end of a long sweltering day, as markets and businesses begin to close for the evening, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. Award-winning author Myriam J. A. Chancy masterfully charts the inner lives of the characters affected by the disaster
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We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.
- By AuthorAnnaBella on 03-15-22
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Belle Cora
- A Novel
- By: Phillip Margulies
- Narrated by: Graham Rowat, Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 25 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the home where Arabella Godwin was raised it is forbidden to speak her name, and her picture is turned to the wall. But in the turbulent America of the 1850s, everyone knows her as "Belle Cora", madam of San Francisco's finest bordello. Judges and senators do her bidding; a vicious newspaper editor plots her downfall; a preacher looks at her from across his pulpit and tries to forget that once she was his wife. Merchant's daughter, farm girl, prostitute, mother - the only thing that never changes is her tireless pursuit of the one man who can see her for who she really is.
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excellent
- By Patricia on 05-15-20
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Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border.
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The Best Book I Read or Listened to in 2009
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Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor, William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation, as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart.
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"Grandly Entertaining"? Really?
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2666
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Speechless
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Subtle suspense. Riveting. Scary yet sentimental!
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D.I.V.O.R.C.E.
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In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War", then, at age 50, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle.
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A book for dreaming over
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Outline
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A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. They get to talking - about their destination, their careers, their families. Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces analyzed. An intimacy is established as two strangers contrast their own fictions about their lives. Outline is a novel in 10 conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during one oppressively hot summer in Athens.
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Difficult and Better in Print
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
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Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA.
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Wondrous Book!!!
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February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.”
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"Where might God stand?"
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The Savage Detectives
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The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been called the García Marquez of his generation. The Savage Detectives is a hilarious and sexy, meandering and melancholy, companionable and complicated road trip through Mexico City, Barcelona, Israel, Liberia, and finally the desert of northern Mexico. It is the first of Bolaño's two giant works, with 2666, to be translated into English and is already being hailed as a masterpiece.
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Bolaño Poetic Gyre
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A New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year and National Book Award finalist, Pachinko is an "extraordinary epic" of four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family as they fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan (San Francisco Chronicle). In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant - and that her lover is married - she refuses to be bought.
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wonderful book
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Gilead
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Auf dem Sterbebett schreibt John Ames einen Brief an seinen siebenjährigen Sohn. Dem Kind will er alles erklären: Die Einsicht, mit der man das eigene Leben auf einen Schlag begreift, den Trost, der in einer einzelnen Berührung liegen kann, und den Ort, der sein Ende beschließt: Gilead, die kleine Stadt unter dem unermesslichen Himmel des Westens, leicht wie Staub und so schwer wie die Welt.
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Salvage the Bones
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- By: Jesmyn Ward
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A hurricane is building, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets; she's 14 and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting.
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Good but I wish I hadn't read it.
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By: Jesmyn Ward
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Atonement
- By: Ian McEwan
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In Atonement, three children lose their innocence, as the sweltering summer heat bears down on the hottest day in 1935, and their lives are changed forever. Cecilia Tallis is of England's priviledged class; Robbie Turner is the housekeeper's son. In their moment of intimate surrender, they are interrupted by Cecilia's hyperimaginative and scheming 13-year-old sister, Briony. And as chaos consumes the family, Briony commits a crime, the guilt of which she shall carry throughout her life.
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An amazing book about complex human perception
- By Amazon Customer on 08-17-04
By: Ian McEwan
What listeners say about My Brilliant Friend
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Diane
- 04-07-15
Fabulous writer
Coming of age has never been explored on such an intimate level. Gripping and with beautiful language. It's particularly good at enlightening the economics of our living conditions.
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11 people found this helpful
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- RDP
- 10-15-15
Amazing, engaging, moving
I found this story of two friends in a Neopolitan neighborhood vivid, fascinating, and beautifully done. As in Proust, the adventures are quotidian and the pace is slow, but the book brings to life a place and time that felt very real to me, thoughfully and even lovingly recreated, in spite of telling about the pain of growing up in a relatively poor part of town. I read and listen to many novels, and this for me was one of the best I have heard. I already have given the novel as a gift to three people... I heard it in English and in Italian. The Italian is clearly superior, sparkling and more full of emotion, but the English version works our fine, toning down what could appear melodramatic in English and is perfectly natural in Italian. It may not be your cup of tea, but if it is (and chances are high it may be), I am sure you will love it, as I have and many, many readers around the world.
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- 4thace
- 09-06-19
A captivating first section
I read on Wikipedia that the four volumes of the series constitute a single work, according to the pseudonymous author, and so it is fudging a little to be writing a review of only the first quarter. I do not know how long it will be before I get to those installments, though, and it's convenient to be able to share my impressions so far with anyone thinking of also plunging in at the beginning. It is a thrilling experience to begin to understand why the work has gotten so much attention.
This first book has a large number of large characters surrounding the two girls at the center as they negotiate the passage from girlhood to womanhood during the 1950s in Italy. There were a few times where I had to concentrate hard to keep straight some of the secondary characters and what they were in relation to the narrator. Her friend Lila is the one whose presence looms most forcefully throughout the story, with her contradictions and her powerful personality, and it was a surprise at one point in the book when it is out of her mouth that she says the words that are the title of this volume, referring to the narrator, instead of the other way around. The contrast between them is not wide as viewed by the reader but feels wider through the subjectivity of the narrator as early teen. It is not so much that this is an unreliable narrator as one whose emotions and judgments are conditioned by her precise situation at the time. While she is studious and feels unattractive, you get the feeling that it is only a little distance to Lila's mental capabilities and innate ability to captivate men's attentions all told. And if Lila is portrayed as reckless and daring, it is the narrator who finds out that she has taken bigger chances with boyfriends and men during the course of the book.
And because of this I am hedging a bit with my Audible star rating because I need to leave some room for the successive volumes to surpass the establishing one. I hope that will happen, anyway.
The audiobook narration by Hillary Huber felt like just the right performance to complement the book, warm, mature without prior judgment. I am looking forward to listening to the other volumes in the series presented in her voice. I am guessing that the stakes are going to be raised as the characters navigate their ways through early adulthood, and maybe some changes brought about by national and global changes as they move in to the 1960s and beyond.
The world is a frightening place in this book. The household is no sanctuary for a child, nor is school, and unless a child has the luck of being accepted into some organization that protects its members (the city government, organized crime syndicates, a wealthy ancestry) they are under enormous pressure to clutch after whatever morsels of success come within reach. The narrator found herself talented at school subjects, though not as much out as a natural gift as a willingness to devote long hours after school to her lessons. By contrast, her friend Lila did have a certain instinctual genius in a number of areas, but had the additional handicap of being held back by even more meager family circumstances. When Lila thinks she has found a way out of her predicament by the end of the book, you have a feeling of impending ruin because nothing in the story has suggested that this world would offer up any easy solutions to anyone there. It is all beautifully depicted.
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- Listener
- 08-21-16
Captivating
I read this because of a glowing recommendation of a friend. I was captivated from the first paragraph. While it is the story of a fractured, somewhat dysfunctional relationship between two girls it was, to me, a study of a different culture. As I am 1st generation Italian American I understand, and grew
up with, the family dynamics as written in this novel. And although many readers may be amused by the Italian family values post WW II, I can assure you that was how it was whether in Naples or the US.
I am looking forward to reading the second part of this trilogy as we follow these girls who are both friends & rivals into their adulthood.
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- heART
- 06-26-16
minutia and tedium are prevalent
Would you try another book from Elena Ferrante and/or Hillary Huber?
not from Ferrante
What was your reaction to the ending? (No spoilers please!)
I didn't care
Which scene was your favorite?
none
Was My Brilliant Friend worth the listening time?
definitely not. I never felt engaged. I couldn't relate to the women
Any additional comments?
no
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-20-16
Not Brilliant.....
The ending did not tie to the beginning. I didn't feel the author took the story to a conclusion.
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- BLamb
- 03-21-17
Disappointing
I liked this story until the homosexual thoughts were brought into the story. All of a sudden I was flung into the 21st century and all believability was gone. It was very disappointing.
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- Olivier Dunrea
- 05-10-19
The First Book is Fantastic!
After watching the series on HBO we couldn't wait for the next 3 books to be made into series. So...we decided to listen to the audiobooks. What a disappointment! The narrator's voice is the most monotone, unexpressionless, uninterested, and uninteresting as can be. The unhappiness, relentless misery, annoying characters, depressive narrative, no spark of life to these characters lives whatsoever.
We could only get up to Chapter 51 in the second book and finally had to abandon it. The neverending misery was just too much. And, again, the narrator's voice made it even moreso.
We love Audible and it's not often that we return audiobooks. However, these 3 books will be returned.
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- Sophia Pierro
- 04-22-16
Good - but why wasn't it edited?
The reader was good, but she would mispronounce the names every once in a while, which pulled you out of the story completely. Odd that it wasn't caught and fixed before being released.
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- PMC
- 12-29-15
Italian Soap Opera
the inner workings of a Neapolitan. ghetto are not very interesting having grown up in one
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