Sofia Montrone's first novel, Nymph, handles the coming-of-age of a girl named Leo, alongside the aging of her family's Italian agriturismo. Leo and her family--her Italian mother, American father, and one-year-younger brother, Max--spend every summer at the rural hotel, helping to run the family business. Readers watch Leo move toward adulthood over the course of two summers, when she is 10 and when she is 18.
When she is younger, Leo cleans rooms and helps prepare food alongside her Nonna Tina. Max works at the front desk. Their mother is unwell and mostly sleeps. Their father, a professor and a heavy drinker, reads and tells stories; his renditions of Homer's epics are among the many threads that keep Leo captivated. By the novel's second part, the shape of her family will be changed irrevocably, and is still changing. Her Nonna Tina, the hotel's faithful employee Davide, and Leo's immediate family are maturing or withering. The hotel is in decline. Leo herself is on the cusp of the next stage of her life, as a newcomer--an American teenager, curious, creative, and enthralling--captures her attention.
Nymph tracks these processes in prose as lovely, fleeting, subtle, and shocking as growing up ever is. Ten-year-old Leo experiences the fallibility of her most beloved elders, and 18-year-old Leo finds her first love and still more loss. These tentative steps toward adulthood are set against a striking rural and natural setting, punctuated by the World Cup games that hold Italy rapt. Nymph is concerned with growth, shedding, and origins. This nuanced, wise novel expands with quiet understatement to reach profundity. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia