Review: "The Cursed Friend" by Beatrice Salvioni

The Cursed Friend" by Beatrice Salvioni, translated by Elena Pala
English edition published May 2024 via HarperVia
★★★

In 1930s Italy, Francesca is on the cusp of something—though of what, she's not yet sure. But by the time the book opens, she is helping to hide a waterlogged body by the edge of the river.

At the core of the story is a girl Francesca knows initially only as the Cursed One—a girl who, the locals say, was responsible for the death of her brother and the death of her father, a girl whose word or sometimes simply presence can bring about misfortune. Francesca is not so sure, and the more she gets to know the Cursed One the more she wonders whether the norms she thought were set in stone are correct. But this is not a time and place where dissent is encouraged, and the further Francesca strays from what is accepted, the closer she comes to tipping past the point of no return.

I read this largely because the description reminded me of The Unbreakable Heart of Oliva Denaro. It ends up being more of a story about friendship, which I love—I always want more stories about platonic female friendship. Neither Francesca nor Maddalena (the titular cursed friend) was quite as richly characterized as I might have hoped, though Maddalena has a more complicated background—there are, for all that she is something of an outcast, perhaps as many bright spots in her life as in Francesca's.

The placement of the body is also interesting: it opens the story with a bang, at which point we drop back a year or so to see what led up to it—and for crucial details like whose body are they hiding? But part of me wished that the death (and circumstances around it) were able to serve as something to bind the girls together and propel them forward in their friendship rather than as something more climactic.

This is a translation from the Italian, so I'm not always sure whether I'd feel the same way with the original or whether something was lost in translation. Some things feel disconcertingly modern (e.g., a character saying "not gonna lie" (loc. 2556)), and the one needle-scratch thing I found—I'm not sure whether this was a translation choice or an editorial one—was the use of "Mom" and "Dad" rather than whatever a 1930s small-town Italian girl would have been using; "Mom" and "Dad" sound glaringly American and modern, and some creative use of the Google Books Ngram Viewer suggests that it is unlikely that even an American of the 1930s would have been calling her mother "Mom". I like to think that I'm an intelligent enough reader to understand that when a character refers to her "Ma" or her "Mamma" or whatever it would be for the time and place, she means the same thing that I do when I say "Mummy"!

I'd like to read more along these lines, though—dark, heavily anchored in time and place, focused on friendship rather than romance. If there's a book out there that has some version of Maddalena's sister Donatella's story, wherever it goes from here, I'd like to read it.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.