Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: Alienation and awakenings

This short but powerful novel by Giorgio Bassani is less well known than his most famous work, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. However, it deals with similar themes of alienation and the awakening into adulthood. At one level, this is a story of an adolescent Jewish boy surviving in the Catholic world of Ferrara in the 1930s. Although academically successful at school, he is set, and indeed places himself, apart from his peers. At another level, it is a story of sexual awakenings and sexual uncertainty. Perhaps above all it is about friendship, the betrayal of trust and entry into the adult world. Beautifully drawn by Bassani, and crisply translated by Weaver, like Moravia's 'Two Adolescents', this is a world too rarely visited with empathy and sensitivity. Well worth reading. It will bring back memories. It will make you think.