Elena is an honored student, and Lila is the prettiest girl around, the goal of most of the young men in the neighborhood. When she has the upper hand, Lila has the lower, and vice versa. When Elena reaches the age for high school, she is promoted and encouraged to attend. Meanwhile, Elena excels at school, with some help from Lila in Latin and Greek. All of her fierceness and intelligence is poured into the project. The shoes become her focus and obsession for more than a year. Lila, who is brilliant but cannot go to school, throws all of her energy into a way out: she and her brother Rino design and hand-make a pair of shoes that they hope to mass market and sell with the Cerullo name. The goal for both girls is to rise above their birth and leave 'the neighborhood,' the area where families have lived for generations and are at the whim of the Solara family.

Elena, too, longs to be pretty and finds as many ways as she can to match Lila’s success. By age thirteen, Lila has developed into the beauty of the neighborhood. The girls reach adolescence with all of the normal trappings: insecurities, varying levels of self-confidence, and crushes on the local boys. At times she needs Lila’s help, and at times she is carried by her own intelligence and flair for writing. Without Lila to compete with, she continues through school with success. Lila’s father is a shoemaker, and Elena’s is a porter in a Naples hotel. However, at the end of elementary school, Lila is unable to continue because her parents won’t pay for it, but Elena does. Elena was a good student, but Lila better. They immediately bond over school and common hatred for the neighborhood ‘ogre,’ Don Achille.Īs the girls grow older, they compete in all things. The girls meet at age six in their poor Naples neighborhood. The novel opens with a flashback: the narrator is Elena, a woman in her mid-60s, looking back on her six-decade friendship with Lila Cerullo. 'My Brilliant Friend' is a story of friendship-humbling, raw, human friendship-amid the backdrop of a poor section of postwar Naples, Italy.

My brilliant friend book 2