There is a specific feel to the way time moves during a childhood and adolescent summer. It’s both sludgy and warp-speed, too slow when you need it to end, too dreadfully quick just when you need it to last. These summers are foundational in how a person learns to be: how you are when you’re bored is as important as how you are when you’re in the middle of the starburst of feeling.
Sofia Montrone, in her outstanding debut Nymph, displays a mastery of the effects of time, how the days themselves characterize us. The novel, set in rural Italy over two very distinct summers, is an elegy for the way time leaves us. It is a love story as much as it is a loss story as much as it is a celebration of the brutal, giddy risk of feeling. It has a wicked sense of humor. There are retellings of The Odyssey, deeply-felt family pains, a formative romance and a consistent sense of becoming.
But above all, it achieves what all great art aspires to: it makes the reader feel less alone. I came upon this novel in the noblest way, I think. A friend recommended it. He said, “This one’s something special.” He was right.
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