Are sisters separate from us..........?

Pietrantonio visits once again the Girl from 'A Girl Returned'. Our girl has grown up and because of a traumatic moment in her life she flashes back to several episodes in her life which have all left their mark on her and her family.

She examines family, marriage, love, sisterhood and selfhood. With her spare language now chaotically trying to keep up with these memory flashbacks we once again visit her and her family and find out that the past always leaves a mark on present and future but we continue. She delves deep into her relationship with her sister, where they have separated and where they continue to meet and forge that deep bond between them.

An ARC kindly provided by publisher/author via Netgalley

A return To Girl Returned the first book I read by this author.Once again I was drawn in by these two sisters by their complicated love hate relationship.Their lives have taken seperate paths but reconnect at the time Adrianna the more troubled sister arrives on the doorstep with a baby needing to stay at her sisters home.The familial connections the emotional issues once again drew me in the author writes so well her characters come alive.Will be recommending this as well as girl returned.#netgalley#europa

A Sister’s Story (Borgo sud) is the sequel to A Girl Returned (l’Arminuta). Set in the southern Italian city of Pescara and the fisherman’s neighbourhood Borgo Sud, it follows the difficult adult lives of two sisters, the unnamed narrator and her younger sister Adriana.

Adriana is constantly a victim of her poor choices. Her arc takes a hard look at a woman’s misfortune due to bad upbringing, lack of education and choice, and an ingrained acceptance of men’s irresponsibility and violence.

Different from Adriana, the narrator is educated and professionally successful. She doesn’t suffer physical violence, but the emotional trauma caused by her nasty parents, troublesome sister and selfish husband cut even deeper. Everyone in her life is toxic, exploiting her generosity while making her feel unworthy and unwanted. Despite that, she finds the strength to come to terms with her past and accept these people’s roles in her life.

This was a really tough read, but I must give it credit for the short punchy scenes, outstanding characterisation and a strong sense of place.

That said, I have a problem with the lack of narrative coherence overall and how the foreshadowing at the beginning turns out to be incongruent with later developments.

In the opening chapters, Adriana shows up unexpectedly at the narrator’s door, carrying a baby in her arms and asking for refuge. The narrator writes: ‘I couldn’t have imagined the revolution that was about to begin: if I had foreseen it I might have left them outside. Adriana believed she was an angel with a sword, but she was a careless angel and sometimes wounded by mistake.’

Naturally I assumed that Adriana’s sudden appearance must somehow be the cause of the changes. Nope. That scene and Adriana’s action have zero bearing on the heartbreaks to come. The two main parts of the story (Adriana’s life and the narrator’s marriage) just don’t come together. The final third of the book falls flat despite the intense buildup in earlier chapters, which is a real pity.

A Sister's Story is the story of Adriana, the narrator's sister. It's odd, I didn't understand don't know her name until I wrote this.

The story starts with Adriana with a baby in her arms at her sister's door, which surprised her because nobody heard about Adriana in a previous year. But, it's not only about Adriana. Also is about the narrator and her husband, Piero. Oddly, I keep using the narrator, name her N.!

The tale moves in time, past continue to present and their future. From when N. and Adriana were youth and live with their parent. They grew older, built their own life and friends, married, and again after a while of distance faced each other!

This was an easy read contemporary story set in France and Italy, about the sister's relationship, family, love, and betrayal.

Thanks to Europa Editions and NetGalley for giving me a chance to read A Sister’s Story by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, translated by Ann Goldstein, I have given my honest review.

This is the sequel to the very successful (in Italy at least) L’Arminuta (2017) or the Returned about a young girl that is ‘delivered’ back to her biological family, without understanding who those poor people are and why the parents she thought she had no longer seemed to want to have anything to do with her. In short, quite a dramatic, disorienting and suspenseful story that I enjoyed a lot also because of its setting in the Italian Abruzzi 1970s and the very intense writing style.

I am doubting very much between 3 and 4 stars. ‘A Sister's Story’ or ‘Borgo Sud’ clearly does not have the tension and strong emotions of The Returned, although also this one is full of dramatic experiences. We meet the two sisters again, they are adults now and their lives seem to have run ‘as expected’ based on their characters that we know so well: the thoughtful Arminuta, the fearless Adriana. But I have to say it was difficult for me to identify with them and honestly I was reminded almost as often of Ferrante's Lila and Lenù as I was of the sisters in the first novel…

The writing is still good and held my attention, but the central mystery, the tension, the novelty too of the setting, were all missing. Ultimately, I am not sure it was a great idea to have a sequel, but I guess many fans will appreciate it.

The sequel to the book A Girl Returned, A Sister’s Story is Italian fiction translated into English by Ann Goldstein (Elena Ferrante’s translator). It was a finalist for the Strega Prize 2021 (the Italian literary prize for fiction).

The book tells the story of two sisters, our unnamed narrator and her sister Adriana, their complicated love lives, relationships, motherhood, ageing parents and the emotional toll of it all.

The book is set between Grenoble in France, and Pescara in Italy, in particular Borgo Sud, an area of Pescara where fishermen live and work. The original book in Italian is called Borgo Sud.

The prose is dreamlike and perplexing at times. It moves in time and place regularly and it’s not always easy to follow what is happening and when. I couldn’t tell whether there was some cultural nuance I was missing, whether something was lost in translation or whether the author’s style was deliberately abstruse. Perhaps if I’d read the first book, it might have been a little clearer.

The story begins to come together though around the halfway mark and from that point on, I found it gripping. The ending is quite devastating. Overall, an enjoyable read and I’m going to seek out and read the first book A Girl Returned. 3/5 ⭐️

A Sister’s Story will be published on 20 January 2022 by @europaeditions. Many thanks to the publisher and to @netgalley for an advance digital copy of the book. As always, this is an honest review.

A return here to the characters in A Girl Returned, the only other of this author’s books I’ve read. Since I admired that one so much, I had high hopes for this sequel, and wasn’t disappointed. It stands alone perfectly well, though I would still recommend reading the earlier work for a more complete picture of the family.

This book focuses on the relationship between the still unnamed narrator, conventional and compliant, and her wilder, reckless sister Adriana. Their core relationship of frustration mixed with fierce loyalty is layered with others - ageing parents/adult children, grown childhood friends, complicated marriages, for example - to create a rich setting for the events unfolding over a couple of decades, though it took me some time to get to grips with the varying timeframes within the narration.

‘Parents and brothers, the town in the hills, were far away, in the harshness of dialect. They occupied memories that were not happy, and barely encroached on the present. She, on the contrary, was always so alive and dangerous. I felt intensely the unease of being her sister.’

‘With my sister I shared a legacy of words not said, gestures omitted, care denied. And rare, unexpected kindnesses. We were daughters of no mother. We are still, as always, two girls who ran away from home.’

An intense, emotional story conveyed with subtlety and empathy. Recommended.

Firstly, I had not read Girl Returned or any other books by Donatella Di Pietrantonio so this was a novel of discovering a new author. This is a tightly told tale of the relationship between two sisters. It is told over a period of years and moves back and forth through the novel. It took me a while to warm to the slightly maverick sister,Adriana, but as the story unfolded I was intrigued to determine what caused the changes in the two sisters’ lives and ultimately where the plot would lead. The text is in some sense sparse but powerful and the dynamic that is established clearly identifies the frustrations between the siblings but also the love that permeates between them. A tale of contemporary lives and the pitfalls that lay before us .

This is another book by Di Pietrantonio which centres on the complexities and ambiguities of familial relationships, especially (though not exclusively) the sibling bond between two sisters. The schematic of the 'wild' sister and the 'stable' one is utilised but is also nuanced here, with a context of volatile dynamics in love and the family.

The writing is sparse and readers who get easily confused about changing timeframes may find this challenging as we mostly experience the story though one sister's interiority where past and present are more porous and continuous. I like that there's a sense of the stress and anxiety that intimacy can create, as well as a closeness that is risky but also rewarding.