The Lost Daughter

From the author of The Days of Abandonment comes The Lost Daughter, Elena Ferrante's most compelling and perceptive meditation on womanhood and motherhood yet.

Leda, a middle-aged divorcee, is alone for the first time in years when her daughters leave home to live with their father. Her initial, unexpected sense of liberty turns to ferocious introspection following a seemingly trivial occurrence. Throughout the novel, Ferrante's language is as finely tuned and intense as ever, and she treats her theme with a fierce, candid tenacity.

©2006 Edizioni E/O. Translation ©2008 by Europa Editions (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Still not quite sure what to say about this book

I definitely feel some kind of way about this book—about Elena. But not quite sure what. It’s great, and dredges up a lot of emotions. Not a simple story, though.

Beautiful and Freeing

Oh my beautiful, would suggest a must read before a second child. The wording is deep of simple thoughts a mother has and feels…just fleeting thoughts that run in and out of your mind but you question how a mother thought them. Only to realize other mothers have thought them too. It doesn’t really make you a bad mother…the fact that you question yourself in itself allows you to see your were/are a good mother. Wow on to the Netflix movie (some may not like that sentence but I am interested to see maggie gyllenhaal version that Ferrante allowed. What a sense of freeing as a woman after reading. You wonder if you would not of been so hard on your younger self.

Ferrante at her best

A remarkable turn of events, a devastating ending. And Ferrante's marvelous prose. Worth every page.

Ferrante's finest shorter work

A violent slap in the face of a book. This one is about the trauma of motherhood, which is both reveling and mysterious and leaves you feeling haunted by Ferrante’s undercurrents of hidden violence which pervade all her works.

If you’ve read the Neapolitan quartet, you’ll see familiar mirror components here and there. The more I read Ferrante, the more I get a sense of who she is. Her writing is vicious and completely compelling and forces you to reflect on your own truths and personal sense of morality. I liked this one best of all her shorter novels.

Hillary Huber, once again, captures Ferrante perfectly.

Disappointing at the end

The reader was really good. I liked the writer’s views on motherhood but the story was not good. The book ended abruptly without a conclusion or a moral lesson.