I am so glad that this second book focuses more on Elena and a little less on Lila than the first book does. Lila irritates me. Of course, you can't read about Elena without reading about Lila, but that's okay with me now that Elena is more of her own person. 
 Elena is very perceptive and self-aware. Even as she's making mistakes, she seems aware that she's making a mistake, like when she is being brought into a confidence and realizes that she's being flattered. "But above all, I have to admit, what pleased me was the importance he attached to me," Elena writes. Watching triangulation taking place in real life, it seems that this kind of insight isn't necessarily common. This awareness could just be a product of Elena looking back on the past with more mature eyes, but either way, because all of this comes from Ferrante's imagination, the presence of this awareness and the fact that I think of Elena as a real person speaks to Ferrante's ability to develop rich, realistic characters. 
 It's also possible that I like Elena because I relate to her. (Of course, I just said she was unusually perceptive, so you can make your own guesses about what opinion I have of myself.) At the end of chapter 106, Elena writes, "I would always be afraid: afraid of saying the wrong thing, of using an exaggerated tone, of dressing unsuitably, of revealing petty feelings, of not having interesting thoughts." I'm intimately acquainted with this kind of fear---the fear of doing wrong, speaking wrong, acting wrong, being wrong---and the fact that Elena also feels it endears her to me. 
 I am enjoying this series very much, and I hope the next two books show up for me at the library in time for Dewey's 24-Hour Readathon next month.