I review other people’s books all the time.

So on the final day of September, I decided to do something considerably more uncomfortable. I reviewed my own.

As the Lupe Farkas who opens an ARC, starts underlining things, gets annoyed when something feels forced, becomes emotionally attached to people who do not exist, and usually cares far more about what a book made her feel than whether it behaved perfectly.

So here we go.

Before October Ends by Lupe Farkas

The first thing that would have caught me is the structure. Ninety days. A diary. A countdown running quietly beneath every entry. That is a risky structure because a countdown can become a gimmick very quickly, but here I think it does something much more interesting.

The numbers begin as a framework and then, slowly, they become pressure. You become aware of time passing in a way you normally are not while reading a novel, and the closer the diary moves toward October, the more attention you start paying to everything Elisabetta says. And perhaps even more importantly, to everything she doesn’t.

That is where the book started working on me.

Elisabetta would have frustrated the hell out of me

Which is probably one of the reasons I would have liked her. I do not need female characters to make sensible decisions. Actually, sensible characters would destroy half the books I love.

Elisabetta is intelligent enough to analyse herself and emotionally tangled enough to make a complete mess of that analysis. There were moments when I would have wanted to shake her, moments when I would have wanted to hug her, and moments when I would have wanted to put the book down, walk around the room and come back only after having a serious conversation with an imaginary woman.

That is usually a good sign.

She can be loving, selfish, frightened, stubborn, perceptive and completely irrational, sometimes within the same few pages. She is not designed to be admired. She is designed to be understood.

Those are very different things.

The diary is the cleverest part of the book

Because diaries feel honest. That is the trap. A diary gives you intimacy. It does not necessarily give you objectivity.

Everything reaches us through Elisabetta: what she notices, what she remembers, what she explains, what she forgives and what she refuses to name. Once I realised that, I stopped reading the diary simply for what happened. I started reading the spaces around what happened.

A reaction from somebody else. A sentence that feels slightly different from the way Elisabetta interprets it. A contradiction. A silence. A detail that seems insignificant until it suddenly doesn’t.

I love books that make me participate. This one does.

The relationships are wonderfully uncomfortable

This is probably where readers will disagree with one another the most. Good. Those are my favourite books.

There are relationships in Before October Ends that can be read in more than one way depending on what the reader brings into the story. Love, dependency, loyalty, fear, possession, protection and control can sometimes exist in the same relationship at the same time.

That interests me far more than a story where everybody arrives neatly labelled.

Massimo in particular would absolutely have me arguing with other readers. I already know it. One person will see one thing, someone else will see something completely different, and I suspect both of them will be able to point to the book and explain why.

That is fun.

The psychologists surprised me

Therapy scenes in fiction can go very wrong. They can become little explanatory machines where the therapist conveniently summarises the novel for the reader. That would have irritated me enormously.

Instead, the strongest moments here come from resistance. Elisabetta already has explanations. She already has a version of events. She already understands herself. Or at least she thinks she does.

So the tension is not simply in what the psychologists say. It is in what Elisabetta accepts, what she rejects, what makes her defensive, what reaches her, and what slides straight past because she is not ready to look at it.

Those scenes become another way of watching her mind work. That is much more interesting.

Tuscany is beautiful, which makes everything worse

I mean that as a compliment. Tuscany is very easy to romanticise: a beautiful house, a new beginning, light through old windows, wine, trees, peace. You know the drill.

But beauty does not automatically make a person peaceful. You can change countries. You can buy a house. You can create routines. You can surround yourself with beautiful things.

And still arrive carrying yourself.

That contrast worked for me. The setting offers possibility. Whether Elisabetta knows what to do with possibility is another question entirely.

What would I criticise?

This is where reviewing your own book becomes considerably less comfortable. The repetition will not work for everyone. Elisabetta circles thoughts, revisits fears, returns to conversations and tells herself versions of the same thing more than once.

From a purely conventional editing perspective, there are places where another reader might want the book tightened. But there is also an argument for keeping that repetition because people do this, especially when they are stuck.

We do not think something once, solve it beautifully and move on. We obsess. We rewrite conversations in our heads. We convince ourselves, and then we convince ourselves again.

So I understand why it is there. But I would still mention it in a review because some readers will feel it more strongly than others.

I would also say this is not a book for someone who needs constant external action. The tension is psychological. It builds through perception, relationships, memory and very small shifts.

If you need a car chase every four chapters, Elisabetta is probably going to annoy you beyond recovery. If you like sitting inside somebody’s head and slowly realising that you may understand them differently than they understand themselves, keep reading.

This book does not give you easy people

And I loved that. Nobody here exists simply to fulfil a role: the good friend, the bad lover, the wise professional, the victim, the rescuer. Human beings are more irritating than that.

People can love us and still hurt us. They can try to help and get it wrong. They can understand one part of us beautifully while completely misunderstanding another. They can be right for the wrong reasons and wrong for the right reasons.

They can make decisions that look completely different depending on where you are standing. That messiness feels central to the book.

The questions are stronger than the answers

This is probably what I would still be thinking about after finishing it. What do we owe the people we love? At what point does loyalty become something else? How much of our identity can be built around another person before we stop recognising ourselves? Can we trust the story we tell about our own life?

And perhaps the most uncomfortable question: what happens when you know something intellectually but your emotions refuse to follow?

The book never turns those questions into a lecture. Thank God. It leaves you to argue with them.

And no, I am not telling you anything about the ending

Nice try. I am a reviewer. I have standards.

What I will say is that the final stretch made me reconsider things I had read earlier. And that is exactly what I want from psychological fiction.

I want to finish a book and mentally walk backwards through it. I want earlier conversations to feel slightly different. I want to wonder whether I noticed what I was supposed to notice. I want to argue with myself.

Before October Ends gave me that.

Anything more would ruin the fun.

What stayed with me?

Elisabetta. Definitely Elisabetta.

Not because I agree with her, and not because I admire every decision she makes. Because I understand just enough of her reasoning to find her fascinating.

There is a kind of psychological fiction where you spend the entire book thinking, I would never do that.

This is more uncomfortable, because every so often you catch yourself thinking, I understand why she did that.

And then you wish you didn’t.

That, for me, is where the book gets under your skin. Not in some enormous dramatic moment, but in the tiny compromises, the explanations, and the things people tell themselves because the alternative would require them to reconsider everything.

That is what I would still be thinking about after closing it.