This book wasn’t for me. Unfortunately I had to DNF at 25% as I was not enjoying it and couldn’t connect with it. Disappointing

Wonderful and atmospheric.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for letting me access an advance copy of this book in exchange for my feedback.

This was an interesting, powerful little book. It is full of hope and trust as well as pain. I wanted to be longer so that I could know the characters better. I'd love to read more from Parrella.

It is a beautiful and emotional story. It is a translation from Italian to English. It played beautifully on the bond of the two women. The loss, the love and the emotions. I haven't read the original book but I feel that it would have been better in Italian and some of the beauty got lost in translation.
But if you like a book that pulls on your heartstrings and feelings, dive right in!

Beautifully written and translated story of imprisonment of many kinds. Imprisonment of ones broken body, imprisonment of the mind. How it is to be trapped/imprisoned by the circumstances of one's class. It is about loneliness but also about friendship, loss and finding, death and life, endings and beginnings.

Almarina is a powerful and emotionally resonant story of a mathematics teacher from the juvenile prison of Nisida and of her little Romanian student, Almarina. There is an island in the Mediterranean where kids never go to sea. Moored like a vessel, Nisida is a prison on the water, and it is there that Elisabetta Maiorano teaches mathematics to a group of young inmates. She is fifty years old, she lives alone, and every day a guard opens the gate for her, closing Naples behind her: in that small classroom without bars, she tries to set up the future. But one day Almarina arrives in class, then the light changes and illuminates a new horizon. The inextricable labyrinth of bureaucracy, unexpected mourning, sleepless nights, reveal their other possibility: to be a starting point. In the hope that one day, when these boys have served their sentence, there will be new pages to fill, white "like the laundry hanging on the terraces". This clear and intense novel is perhaps a small love story, perhaps a great lesson on the possibility of not stopping.

To atone, forget, start over. “Seeing them go away is the hardest thing, because: where will they go. They're still so small, and they'll go back to where they came from, and where they came from is why they're here. This is a stunning meditation on the pain and loneliness and suffering we, as humans, go through told through the eyes of one with freedom, love and hope that things will improve, progress. Parrella's words claw at your heart with their harsh beauty so much so that every sentence is worth savouring due to its poetic nature. It's compelling, heartbreaking and intense but also warm, intimate and political. Parrella precisely touches the emotions, giving voice to two forms of loneliness whose power will move us. There is the poetry of a story suspended in a temporal stasis typical only of a place like the juvenile prison of Nisida, and the simplicity and intensity of real, tangible and moving things. And the pain of memories, the relief of seeing them change and extend and grow to find their place within us. Highly recommended.

Sheer escapism, beautifully written, I will look for more of this author’s work.
My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my advance copy of this title. I highly recommend it.

This is a quiet and tender story of two women - Elizabetta, a lonely Italian woman who works in a juvenile immigrant detention centre as a teacher of mathematics, and Almarina, a young Romanian inmate who bears the scars of her abusive upbringing. In the most unlikely of places, the two women form a bond and a way to live again.

This book was shortlisted for the Italian Strega Literary Prize and though there’s a political message in there, it’s primarily a universal tale of loneliness, grief and starting over.

I really wish I could have given this book a higher rating as it is a beautiful story but it felt like quite a poor translation from its original Italian language into English. It was a little incoherent at times. I could tell I was losing some of the meaning and it was frustrating. Hopefully some of the translation issues will be ironed out before publication.

*Almarina will be published on 22 July 2021. I read an advance digital copy of the book courtesy of the publisher John Murray via @netgalley. As always, this is an honest review.*