Description
When you are born, you don’t choose your name. Cecilia’s was decided by her father, and that’s why it’s special. Three full syllables that feel “clean” like her bond with him, but get dirty when her mother pronounces it, shortening the name to the first four letters. It is only in the summer of her thirteenth year, spent in Ischia as always, that Cecilia discovers from her younger brother a different truth: she shares her name with an amphibious worm, an animal species that shows no obvious gender differences. This awareness is just a taste of what she will face during those days on the island: dreams haunted by sea creatures, mysterious arguments between her parents, the impending cycle, and that femininity so hated, from which she can no longer escape. But there is a beach, the Maronti, where these problems seem unable to reach her. There, she finds a group of teenagers caught up in their first romantic approaches. Mistaken for a boy by her new friends, Cecilia instinctively decides to cultivate that misunderstanding and adopts her brother’s name, Luca. So, while she is female with her parents, she is male at the Maronti. And she is especially so for Alba, an exuberant girl who boldly experiences her first erotic desires, which both attracts and frightens her at the same time. Over the course of a summer, Cecilia thus finds herself facing the delicate transition to adulthood. Hers is a disorienting search for herself, to understand the most difficult thing of all: who she really is and who she wants to be. The first novel by a very young writer but with already mature talent.
