"This novel nearly broke me.

The Story of the Lost Child is beautifully heartbreaking. It is the culmination of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan series, and it wraps up the story of two friends, Elena and Lila. I spent my summer with these two women. I read the first book, My Brilliant Friend, just to see what all the Ferrante Fever fuss was about, and I didn't expect to read any more of the series. But I ended up intrigued and wanting more, and I gobbled up Books 2 and 3 as quickly as I could.

In this fourth book, Elena has run away from her marriage to Pietro and has a passionate affair with Nino, the boy she has loved since childhood. Lila is opposed to the affair, and the women's friendship becomes even more strained. Meanwhile, Elena's writing career has ups and downs, and Lila becomes entangled in the underground politics of their old neighborhood in Naples.

It is hard to explain to someone who hasn't read Ferrante why these novels are so powerful. On the surface, they sound like any other domestic drama � two women living their lives, experiencing love and loss, going through the highs and lows of marriage and parenthood.

But it's not that simple. Their lives are so well-drawn, their emotions and experiences are so real, and the history and neighborhoods of Italy are so well-described that this book feels more like an autobiography than a novel. The Ferrante books are rich in the same way that Tolstoy's novels are a feast. To paraphrase an Internet meme, One does not simply read a Ferrante book. One lives it.

I have become deeply connected to Elena and Lila over these four books. When Elena's mother is diagnosed with cancer, and Elena has to care for her, I nodded in sympathy, for I, too, am caring for a mother with cancer. When Elena experiences incredible heartbreak, I empathized and remembered my own heartbreak. When Lila suffers a devastating loss and is consumed with manic grief, I thought of my own despair after a loss.

Some reviewers have said this fourth novel is the best one in the series. I honestly couldn't rank them. They are all part of one epic story, and I feel both sadness and triumph now that I have finished reading. Sad because I will miss spending time with these amazing women, and triumph at what Ferrante has accomplished. Truly, this is a modern masterpiece.

Favorite Quotes
"How many words remain unsayable even between a couple in love, and how the risk is increased that others might say them, destroying it."

"Good feelings are fragile, with me love doesn't last. Love for a man doesn't last, not even love for a child, it soon gets a hole in it. You look in the hole and you see the nebula of good intentions mixed up with the nebula of bad."

"I thought: maybe every relationship with men can only reproduce the same contradictions and, in certain environments, even the same smug responses."

"From childhood I had given her too much importance, and now I felt as if unburdened. Finally it was clear that what I was wasn't her, and vice versa. Her authority was no longer necessary to me, I had my own. I felt strong, no longer a victim of my origins but capable of dominating them, of giving them a shape, of taking revenge on them for myself, for Lila, for whomever."

"One writes not so much to write, one writes to inflict pain on those who wish to inflict pain. The pain of words against the pain of kicks and punches and the instruments of death."

"Where is it written that lives should have a meaning?"

"I was distressed that nothing of me would endure through time."

"Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.""