Julia and Victoria talk inevitability and unreliable narrators in The Story of the Lost Child and celebrate finishing Elena Ferrante’s iconic Neapolitan series. They try and fail to solve the unsolvable ending.

Julia and Victoria discuss book three in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and explore the complications of living life according to your principles.

This is the last podcast episode of Season 9! We’ll be back in late May with more books and more obsessions. In the meantime, you can watch our book-to-TV reviews of Pachinko on Buy Me a Coffee.

Julia and Victoria discuss when they figured out the twist in The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (at very different points in the book) and all the ways Jemisin expertly builds the world of the Stillness (through language, mythology, science, and culture). Also, Julia listened to this while she had a migraine, and now she’s obsessed with the audiobook reader.

Well over a year later, Julia and Victoria face their fears of long page counts and return to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series with The Story of a New Name. They discuss the complexity and ingenuity of Ferrante’s depiction of womanhood, and how much they hate Nino Sarratorre.

Julia and Victoria contemplate mortality (and whether they could be buried under paper trees to become books in their next lives) with the help of the darkly comic memoir Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Katelyn Doughty about a young woman trying to become a mortician and revolutionize the way Americans handle death.

Julia and Victoria endeavor to answer some fundamental questions about Untamed by Glennan Doyle, such as “What is this book exactly?” and “What’s it about?” and “Who is actually it for?” Unclear whether they succeed.