Welcome to episode 96 of From the Front Porch, a collection of conversations on books, small business, and life in the South.

I'm Annie Jones, the owner of the bookshelf in beautiful downtown Thomasville, Georgia, and today I am joined by two special guests for our fifth Love It or Loathe It episode.

So guests, why don't you introduce yourselves i'm hunter

hunter is a what do you do hunter hair at great clips and beautiful art that sometimes adorns our

store oh that too yeah hunter is a regular voice on the podcast and i'm Emily Emily what do you do I work above the

bookshelf at Everfan and I also run your maker that's right so we have had Emily on the

podcast before so we'll link to her past episode in the show notes and we knew we needed a third

voice for these love it or loathed episodes Rebecca our, our former manager, has moved on to other wonderful things.

And so we thought we would welcome Emily as the new voice for this series.

So I'm really excited because the book we're discussing today is one that we got emails about and requests about.

And it's one that I feel like the whole world has read

so the book is my brilliant friend by Elena Ferranti um I don't even know where to

start with with this book well I heard about this from Lauren Groff who who I am her, I'm her number one fan.

I'm Annie Wilkes to her, like, I'm everything.

But she was like, she was raving about these, and I said, oh, if Lauren Groff likes them,

then I'm going to love it.

And so that's why I was so interested in reading these.

I feel like I had heard about them everywhere.

And I went on the Modern Mrs. Darcy podcast a few weeks ago.

And she brought up my brilliant friend and the Neapolitan novels.

And I kind of gave my bookseller confession that, hey, I have not read those.

Like, and every, I feel like every independent bookstore, they have read them there. At least somebody on staff has read them. Anne Patchette raves about them. And so I talked with Anne on the Modern Mrs. Darcy podcast, and she kind of gave me the nudge that I needed. And then when we had a customer kind of asked us, hey, you should talk about that on your podcast.

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