Nymph
Sofia Montrone
Avid Reader Press, 2026, 256 pages
$27.00

Reviewed by Molly Hunken

Nymph is a startlingly beautiful lesbian coming-of-age story from debut novelist Sofia Montrone, which masterfully combines the visceral sapphic yearning of Chloe Michelle Howarth’s Sunburn with the gorgeous and iconic northern Italian setting of André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name. Readers will be drawn in by the beauty of the protagonist Leo’s small-town life, unable to look away from the unfolding events of her family drama, and moved by the skillfully articulated realities of Leo’s first experience with all-consuming sapphic love.

When the novel begins, we’re introduced to Leo: an inquisitive ten-year-old living and working as a maid at her family’s agritourism hotel in northern Italy. As the hotel has been in Leo’s mother’s family for an entire century, Leo and her younger brother, Max, have visited every summer, catering to guests along with her grandmother, Nonna Tina, and loyal hotel staff, Davide, while enjoying the beauty of the property’s location on a mountainside surrounded by olive and lemon trees in the summer and vineyard grapes in the fall. Leo—short for Leonora—passes her days cleaning the hotel’s rooms while collecting left-behind belongings for her own personal treasure trove (a faux pearl earring, a lock of hair) and playing with her younger brother, Max, with whom she shares everything, including a bedroom. While Leo’s mother wastes away from an unknown mental and physical illness, unable to leave her bed more days than not, Leo’s father, an American professor, recounts to the siblings the tales of Odysseus: he details the fateful trojan horse, Odysseus’ clever escape from the cyclops, and the stories his wife, Penelope, was forced to fabricate of her philandering husband to justify his continued absence to their son, Telemachus. All the while, Leo’s father invites Leo and her brother’s questions and curiosities about these stories, telling the truth even when it seems rather brutal. Nobody comments on the ways in which the dynamics of this classic Greek epic seem to parallel their own family.

Eight summers later, following a great tragedy for Leo’s family, Leo meets Dolores, an American luthier-in-training a year older than her, who begins working at the hotel at Leo’s side. With her shaved head and boyish clothes, Dolores is compelling to Leo in a way which begins as a curious friendship and slowly builds into a deep and undeniable love of Dolores’ entire self, both body and mind. As Leo navigates difficulties with her family—namely, her brother’s apparent newfound disinterest in consciously absorbing the world as he used to and the town’s rumor mill surrounding her father—Dolores serves as a constant reprieve to which she finds herself continually returning and with whom she feels she can share anything, even when it disgraces her or her family in some way. Although, as their love story continues—Leo likening their mutual infatuation with that of Achilles and Patroclus of The Iliad and Dolores simultaneously comparing Leo to the nymphs of Greek mythology and a grasshopper nymph in the midst of evolution—summer’s end draws continually nearer.

Leo’s journey is incredibly relatable to all queer women whose understanding of their sexuality came on suddenly, and readers will find themselves deeply understanding her growing love for Dolores while treasuring her awkward process of lesbian coming of age. Montrone has created a complex family dynamic which undergirds every decision Leo makes, approaching topics of addiction, mental illness, and obsession with tact and care. With its beautifully described yearning and strong motifs of loyalty and temptation of the Greek epics, as well as growth associated with insects and nature (including its idyllic setting), Nymph can and should join the ranks of classic sapphic novels and is a perfect read for slow summer days.

Molly Hunken is a writer and editor based in Chicago, Illinois, and one of Sinister Wisdom’s interns for summer 2026. She loves to read literary fiction, horror, queer stories, narrative nonfiction, and contemporary history, and currently works as a bookseller at Unabridged Bookstore.