I enjoyed the beginning of this, but as it progressed the similarities to (and repetitions of) My Brilliant Friend began to proliferate.
We begin with schoolgirl, Giovanna, in Naples struggling to integrate with family and school, insulted as being ugly by her father who tells her that she looks like his sister Vittoria who, as a result she wants to meet.
Vittoria is a fearsome woman, with a family of step children, the birth children of her lover the long dead Enzo. So she inherits a surrogate family, with whom she had mixed relationships. Her parents separate, each in love up to a point with the parents of her best friends, so almost a wife/husband swap.
He falls in love with the fiancé of her step sister but nothing come of this. She loses her virginity in the last pages to a boy she has no real affection for.
I am a bit lost as to the point of it.
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