A Girl Returned is about an unnamed narrator who tells the story of about a year in her childhood twenty years prior, when she was thirteen and returned by her adoptive parents in a seaside city to her birth parents in a rural town. It details how she had to adjust from being an only child to being one of many in a large, rambunctious family. This is not a comic tale or a lighthearted one, no- the family’s struggles were portrayed very realistically. It’s not pretty and it’s not a feel-good stories where the narrator learns to adjust and be thankful for what she has. In fact, I don’t actually think she’s able to fully adjust by the end of the book. Even in the end, she remains singled out, special, destined for other things.

The book touched on the topic of adoption. Essentially, the narrator was adopted and returned to her birth parents, people she didn’t know. It was difficult for her to call them her parents and in her narration refers to them as “the father” or “the mother”, distant terms as if she’s refusing to acknowledge that they’re her parents. From the beginning, she constantly wishes that her adoptive parents would take her back, until she realized it probably wasn’t going to happen and settled for wanting an explanation, wanting to know why things happened as they did.

The narrator was actually telling the story from a distance of twenty years so she was recounting the story of her childhood from an adult perspective. This distance is evident from the narration as our narrator does mention some things here and there that happen in the future, added with an air of world-weariness in how the story was being told. This gave hints of how the story was going to go.

As much as the narrator struggled to fit in with her new family, she does learn how to adjust with the help of her siblings, Adriana and Vincenzo, and later Giuseppe, the baby she later takes care of. Adriana is a wonderful sister, precocious and knowledgeable about things the narrator wasn’t. She’s the one with her head on her shoulders, level-headed although there are moments where you see that she’s definitely still a child in her actions. Vincenzo was the black sheep of the family, evident from his interactions with his parents, and his interactions with the narrator a bit more than uncomfortable. Still, a tragedy in the family cuts short what could have been a very horrifying not-quite-sibling-relationship between them. Among the characters in the cast, Adriana is really the standout and her relationship with the narrator as sisters is a true highlight in the book.

While the book reads easily and smoothly and I enjoyed the writing, language and dialect is often talked about- like how the narrator speaks differently from the people in her town and how her mother speaks. This would have been easier to see if I could read Italian, but there are always tradeoffs we have to accept when reading works in translation and that’s okay.

A Girl Returned is a short book at 170 pages and touches on the topics of sisterhood, identity, belongingness, and family. It’s not a clear-cut story with a clear-cut ending, but the narrator does find peace where she is and with her sister by her side. It is an excellent book and I recommend it.