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--Leo's Italian mother, her American father, her 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, collecting the motley items guests leave behind, and helps prepare food alongside her Nonna Tina. Max, who is better with people, 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 the epics of Homer are among the many threads that keep Leo captivated. She and Max "want to know where Atlantis is, what feathers are made of, whether hair grows right out of their scalps or from their tangled ends, and he tells them. They have no sense of what is real and what is play, only that the Absent-Minded Professor is a kind of god, all-knowing, and that with the right password, they will be privy to his secrets, which are the secrets of the world." Leo idolizes her father. 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" refers to "those maidens that live in the rivers and trees" as well as "a baby grasshopper," whose short life plays a role in Leo's. Montrone's debut tracks these several 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. "The mountains are nimbed with green light. Dark shapes swoop over the grounds, whether bats or birds she cannot say, only that they form black whorls like clouds." Nymph is concerned with growth, shedding, and origins. "Where does the story of one's life begin? At birth, with one's parents or grandparents, the first days of Italy and its legions of secretive, long-suffering women, Odysseus?" This nuanced, wise novel expands with quiet understatement to reach profundity. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia
Shelf Talker: This sensual, yearning novel of personal tragedy and first love in the Northern Italian countryside will transport readers of all ages.