My problem with Ferrante

Continuing reading Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, volume 1 of her Neapolitan Trilogy, and, oddly (or perhaps not so oddly) I find myself having the exact same thoughts I had several years ago when reading Ferrante's best-known novel, The Days of Abandonment (you can see my 2 posts on that novel to see what I mean): She gets the novel off to a good start, clearly establishing the two main characters, the narrator (Elena) and her best/brilliant friend, Lila, both intelligent but Lila much more intuitive, self-taught, bold; though both live in the same Naples working-class neighborhood, Elena has more parental support, as her parents somewhat grudgingly support her continued schooling (voluntary and costly beyond elementary school, amazingly) while Lila's family pulls her from school and insists that she work in the family shoe-repair business. OK, Ferrante sets that up very well in the first third of the novel, yet as I continue reading I find I'm stuck at the same point: she keeps adding incidents that show in various guises this same initial theme; although the characters mature - the first half of the novel covers roughly 10 years of their lives - their relationship doesn't change or evolve, it's just a more-mature version of the same thing, focused on boyfriends rather than on play w/ dolls for example. Ferrante is an easy writer to read and to like, but in this novel as in Abandonment I find she doesn't get past her initial premise; she makes a point and then makes it again and again - maybe OK for a short novel from for 3 volumes? We'll see.