It is the second volume in her four-book series known as the Neapolitan Novels, being preceded by My Brilliant Friend, and succeeded by Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and The Story of the Lost Child.

A doctor recommends that she spends a season at sea to increase her fertility, and Lila, desperate to not be alone with her mother and sister-in-law, talks Elena into coming with her.

When they spend the night together, Lenù, depressed and alone at the beach, gives in to the advances of Donato Sarratore, Nino's father, who harassed her a few years before, and with whom she has sex.

When she is taking the Matura, the national exam to finish high school in Italy, one of the examiners tells her about the Scuola Normale di Pisa, where she can continue her education without any fees through a scholarship.

In the meanwhile, Lenù has a hard time with her studies in Pisa, because of her poverty and lack of cultural capital, and because of the prejudices of other students, who mock her Neapolitan accent.

Realizing that Stefano has been having an affair with Ada, and not being able to stand his violence anymore, she finally leaves him, and goes to live with Enzo in a working class neighborhood, San Giovanni a Teduccio.

Lenù goes to visit her there, and finding her in awful conditions, gives her The Blue Fairy, which Lila claims she does not remember and then throws into a fiery furnace.

[1][2] Joseph Luzzi, writing for The New York Times, comments "Elena Ferrante is this rare bird: so deliberate in building up her story that you almost give up on it, so gifted that by the end she has you in tears.

"[3] Critics have praised the diversity of tones in the book, that goes from the "sweetness and beauty" of the moments in Ischia, "the intensity of youthful romance", to "the fate of women in a masculine society".

Joanna Walsh, notes for The Guardian:Behind the Neapolitan novels is a sense of "the violence in every house, every family" based in an unspeakable "before": the brutality and betrayals of the Second World War.