I'm tempted to guess that A Girl Returned reminded me of Elena Ferrante's books because they share a translator. It's true that it shares, especially early on, the spare language and gritty realness of the Neapolitan novels. But I suspect that any other perceived similarity can be chalked up to my American ignorance of Italian (and, indeed, world) literature, though I wouldn't fault the publisher for riding on the Ferrante wave in selling this book.

I'm not as ignorant where translation is concerned, so I can surmise that Ann Goldstein is at the top of her game. Of the sentences that tripped me up, only one got in the way of meaning; the others simply made me wonder what the original might be, and what alternatives Goldstein weighed. (An example of the latter: "I felt that she was observing with her voracious rapidity the bursting bag, the package I was having trouble carrying.") And I think translations ought to trip up the monolingual reader, as a way of reminding us that we don't know everything. (Again: ignorant Americans.)

The book itself was fantastic: brief, transporting, resonant. It was the kind of story I could have turned around and reread immediately, if I were a re-reader. The relationship between the sisters was particularly affecting. A taste: "She counted my vertebrae, I was so thin, and for each one she made up a story. She called the most prominent by name and had them converse like old ladies, touching one and then another."

The girl returned is a very appt title for this novel.
The novel opens with a thirteen year old girl carrying her belongings up some steps towards an open door held by her younger sister, although the two sisters have never met.
This is a story of abandonment, of good intentions and, how a child fulfils two women's dreams and needs
At thirteen she is send by her mother to live in a poverty ridden home run by a family with three sons and a nine year old daughter.
With a distance of twenty years, now a grown woman, she shares her recollections of those years with her new family, the discovery of her real mother, the abandonment by the only mother she knew for thirteen years.

The writing is beautiful, characters well developed, the subject of the story, perhaps a cautionary tale....

Thank you NetGalley and Europa for allowing me this arc

Remember that section in Austen's 'Mansfield Park' where Fanny Price returns to her ramshackle family in Portsmouth who gave her away? This book takes that premise (slightly more complicated here) and explores the tensions via the unnamed narrator caught between the poverty-stricken mother who once passed her on, and the wealthy 'mother' who returned her.

What Di Pietrantonio captures so well is the intricacy and intimacy of emotions that play out: the unnamed narrator was just 13 when she was unexpectedly thrust out by the family she thought hers. Newly embedded in a poor family and faced with a group of sibling strangers, her navigation via loathing, detachment, anger, self-pity, moments of rage, shame, and unexpected alliances is grippingly rendered.

This isn't a book written in 'beautiful' sentences, but there is a feeling of emotional authenticity and a lovely clarity in key scenes: the beach, meals in the kitchen, what happens at night.

There's a sort of open-endedness about the narrative which I liked: no moral judgement, no neat 'life-lessons, things remain as messy as human emotions. And if Fanny Price is one literary reference activated by the text, another is 'My Brilliant Friend' - Italian class structures, the support developed between two young girls, the significance of education.

Written with economy, there is more going on here than the sparse page count would suggest.