La Cecilia

When you are born, you don’t choose your name. Cecilia’s was chosen by her father, which is why it is special. Three full syllables, which sound “clean” like her bond with him, but become dirty when her mother pronounces them, 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 a different truth from her younger brother: her name is that of an amphibious worm, an animal species with no obvious gender differences. This realisation is just a taste of what she will have to face during those days on the island: dreams haunted by sea creatures, mysterious arguments between her parents, her impending period and that much-hated femininity, from which she can no longer escape. But there is a beach, Maronti, where these problems seem unable to reach her. There she finds a group of teenagers entangled in their first romantic encounters. Mistaken for a boy by her new friends, Cecilia instinctively decides to cultivate the misunderstanding and adopts her brother’s name, Luca. So, while she is female to her parents, at Maronti she is male. This is especially true for Alba, an exuberant girl who boldly experiences her first erotic desires, which both attract and frighten Cecilia. Over the course of a summer, Cecilia finds herself facing the delicate transition to adulthood. Hers is an alienating 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 with already mature talent.