NYMPH

Two summers nearly a decade apart change a young woman’s life.

Set in the Italian countryside, Montrone’s debut follows Leo, a young American girl, during two significant summers at her grandmother’s century-old agriturismo. Ten-year-old Leo spends languid days goofing around with her younger brother, Max, helping her grandmother clean the hotel, and vying for her seemingly all-knowing father’s attention. Leo’s relationship with her father, a charming yet troubled professor who captivates her with stories from the Iliad, casts a long shadow over the novel. His children are merely distractions from books: “They borrow him when they can. They hold themselves open for him.” Though he is the center of their universe, they slowly realize that, because of his drinking, the center can’t hold. Leo both knows and doesn’t know the full extent of her family’s difficult dynamic. By revealing the enormous gulf between seeing and understanding, Montrone is able to blend the magic and torment of Leo’s childhood. Years later, on the cusp of adulthood, Leo looks back on the past while embarking on another summer that will change her life forever. Still grappling with her father’s death four years earlier, she must contend with the state of the hotel, her grandmother’s declining health, and the growing distance between her and Max. Stuck somewhere between naïve and experienced, she finds her life cracking open when Dolores, an edgy American girl a few years older, begins working at the hotel. As the two become closer, Leo begins to experience first after unbelievable first: “She has been properly kissed and understands how little the richness of experience can be deciphered.” Montrone’s prose is undeniably beautiful and poetically precise; her ability to distill universal experiences in novel ways, especially regarding first love, girlhood, aging, and grief, is particularly noteworthy.

A poignant debut about the bittersweet space between childhood and adulthood.