This is slow-reading at its best. The author touches upon themes that are universal (friendship, family, education, destiny) but by using a recognizable yet peculiar narrator, she succeeds in writing a unique coming-of-age story that completely pulled me in. Percer manages to stay in control of the plotline, her language and style are just beautiful. The changing relationship between the parents and their daughter is written with so much compassion that it nearly hurt to read about the narrator’s attempts to make her life livable. “Our brief, strained exchange made me want to walk out the door after {my father} and back into my old life. But I shook it off, reasoning as I did that he was the one who had led me to where I was, believing that it was not my fault that he didn’t know what to make of me now that I was there.” There is so much in this book that I found myself several times staring into space, trying to take it all in. Conclusion: a highly recommended quirky, touching, wonderful book. I’m looking forward to Percer’s next novel. When I first started reading this book I thought that I had stumbled on to one of those rare tomes that would actually deserve a 5/5 star rating. The first half of this novel follows a young girl through her childhood growing up in a lax Jewish home with a severely depressed mother and a father with a serious heart condition. Naomi Feinstein decides she will become a doctor when she grows up mainly because she fears that she will be left alone otherwise. She also believes that she can fix everyone’s problems if she keeps working hard. Ironically she has her whole life planned out very early on and, even though she progresses through the stages as she wants to some degree, she still finds herself alone and unable to fix things as she moves forward. The first half of this story is philosophical and well balanced. The second half, though, loses some of the solidity that exemplified earlier chapters. Too many characters with too many little plot lines served to mess up the beautiful flow of the story. This left me disappointed. This book is on one hand a coming of age story, but also a story about learning to let go, or said a different way, a story about learning to fix oneself instead of trying to fix everyone else.
What do You think about Educazione Di Una Donna (2012)?
A beautiful novel about a lonely girl discovering herself and her family.
—charlene
Would have given 3.5 if halves were available.
—Isis
I enjoyed this more as it progressed...
—stephelvetica
