I enjoyed this novel and the author. It felt reminiscent of Elena Ferrante, one of my favorite authors. The reflection on female friendship and family dynamics over time is a topic that will always be a favorite. The author did a great job brining naunance to all the characters in the book.

This was an intriguing, albeit difficult read. It reminded me of Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend in the way the characters think and deal with issues and the overarching relationships that form the heart of this novel. I will be buying this when it's out for my shelf!

The Lake's Water is Never Sweet follows Gaia, an Italian teen growing up with her family in Rome. Gaia and her family live in poverty, defining Gaia's life. In her English language debut, Giulia Caminito's writing of Gaia's struggles coming of age with friends and relationships with eloquence and realism. Gaia's sadness, rage, and alienation felt so authentic that I needed to take breaks to process. I love that the book didn't follow the usual map. Gaia's story, raw, painful, and heartbreaking rang true. I recommend The Lake's Water is Never Sweet to readers interested in strong character-driven stories.

Girlhood, coming of age, fraught female friendships, lakeside towns… say less. Giulia Caminito’s English-language debut follows a young woman, Gaia, whose family moves from a poor suburb of Rome to a beautiful town by a lake in an attempt to escape their poverty. Gaia’s family is falling apart, her parents and siblings all struggling in their own private ways. Gaia builds a tenuous friendship with two local girls and tries to fit into her new life, but she begins to believe she might always be an outsider. And then something terrible happens to her friends, and her fragile new life falls apart. A complex, precise portrait of the loneliness of girlhood, The Lake’s Water is Never Sweet is exactly the kind of book I’m looking for this year.

A gorgeous, lyrical coming of age story that reminded me a lot of Elena Ferrante. The Italian translation reads great and I was transported to Italy through the author's beautiful book. A great summer read.

This was an amazing read. Gaia,a young Italian girl grows up in poverty,in a town 20 miles outside Rome. Life is tough. Her Mother works all hours to provide while her father is wheelchair bound following an accident at work.She is bright and can hold her own academically but her poverty is obvious. She is bullied until she fights back in an unexpected way. We follow her trials and tribulations with her family,her few friends,her fellow citizens. It is unsentimental. It is addictive. While reminiscent of My Brilliant Friend it is quite distinctive in tone and characters.

Thanks to NetGalley and Spiegel & Grau for access to this title. All opinions expressed are my own.

A coming-of-age story set in 1990s Rome. This is the author's English language debut.


The things I liked:

(1) The mother- Antonia. A fierce woman whom one does not cross.
(2) The author's note- It's at the end, discovered a lot of the topics were historically based; I wish it had been at the beginning.



What I didn't like:
(1) Gaia, as our protagonist, filled with rage, I failed to connect.
(2) I found this was a slow read. I kept turning my attention to other books I was reading.



There are so many 4-star and 5-star reviews of this book, I encourage everyone to try it out for themselves. It wasn't my cup of tea. But it might be yours!



#TheLakesWaterisNeverSweet #NetGalley.
Publication Date 08/07/25
Goodreads Review 14/07/25

1990s. Rome. Coming of age. These are some of my forever buzzwords and, man, does Giulia Caminito know how to harness the powerful, inescapable feelings of living in extreme poverty.

Our main characters are a mother and her daughter. We meet Antonia, Gaia, and the rest of their family in a Parasite-like basement apartment in the bowels of Rome, From the very first lines, we are swept away in their undertow; riding fast and furious from upper class Rome to its lakeside suburbs and back again. We’ see, with visceral realism, the lengths Antonia and Gaia take to get out of poverty. The strikes and protests they no longer are able to join. The various jobs they must keep. The amount of extracurricular homework them must do to keep afloat among the elite and privileged children. It is both deeply frustrating and incredibly heart rendering. The talent Caminito exudes in each sentence is exuberant, and she is not afraid to let her reader sit in their discomfort.

This is a powerful English debut and stands up to the excellent Italian translated novels we’ve recently been gifted.

Thank you to NetGalley for the early ARC of this book. It is beautifully written and definitely a book worth checking out.

Thank you to Netgalley and Spiegel & Grau for an early copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I loved the storyline and the characters. I thought it was well written. I would definitely recommend this book.

A touching coming-of-age novel commenting on social class, familial ties and friendship, offering a raw and realistic look at growing up and trying to fit in. This brilliantly captured teenage thoughts and emotions, especially when faced with difficult situations, showing the intensity of these experiences and the impact they can have.

I loved that we got to follow our main character, Gaia, across many years, as she discovered what she wanted amidst peer pressure and familial obligations. Highly recommend this one!

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily. It’s the 1990s in this book and that is my favorite decade so right away I loved this book. This family was very relatable as they hope to escape poverty and Gaia, the daughter is a wonderful main character. As she navigates friendships and.l betrayals she becomes even more relatable. The themes of a fragile mind, pain, and determination are strong in this plot but most of all I loved the great detail and emotion on every page, no sugar coating needed at all. This was a beautiful and deep look at the feelings most of us have had at one point in life.

"It wasn't about that horse, it wasn't about the competition, and it wasn't about not having enough money, it was that no one seemed to care about hurting you."

The narrator, Gaia, takes us with her from childhood to young adulthood as she tries to make sense of her relationships with her family, her peers, and perhaps most difficult of all, herself. She's an unreliable narrator in the way that pretty much all of us are: No matter how much we might try otherwise, ultimately we can rely only on our own perceptions.

If all this sounds philosophical and cerebral, "The Lake's Water Is Never Sweet" somewhat is, especially for a coming-of-age story. There's not much joy in it either; Gaia seems to be a poster child for persistent depressive disorder. Much of the writing is beautiful, however, without being showy. And though I don't necessarily want to admit it, I could relate an awful lot to Gaia. She's a character who resonates, and I'm glad I made her acquaintance.

Thank you, Spiegel & Grau and NetGalley, for providing me with an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

A dark, raw coming of age story set in Italy in the 1990s, The Lake's Water is Never Sweet is the story of Gaia, an isolated teen who is dealing with complicated family legacy and poverty.

Guilia Caminito evokes such a strong sense of place in this novel that I felt a bit voyeuristic, looking in on Gaia's most intimate thoughts and feelings. Navigating her family's move from Rome to a lakeside village, Gaia must contend with coming into who she is and deciding which obligations she can hold up. Sad but beautifully written, this is a story that will stay with me for a long time.

I was fortunate enough to get the chance to tandem read the print version with the audio version and I loved both of them.

The Lake’s Water Is Never Sweet offers an unflinching look at class, adolescence, and the quiet violence of unmet expectations. This story follows Gaia, a sharp, angry teenager navigating poverty, displacement, and the claustrophobic weight of family obligation. Told in first person, Gaia’s voice is bracingly honest yet often abrasive.

On the surface is the fraught relationship between Gaia and her mother Antonia, a woman marked by resilience and quiet control. Their dynamic is tense, antagonistic, and painfully believable. Friendships, too, are shaped as much by insecurity and rivalry as by affection; an emotional complex that is specific to teenage uncertainty.

The prose is incisive, clear-eyed in its portrayal of social and personal stagnation. While the narrative dips in momentum mid-way, it opens and closes definitively. This is not a redemptive coming-of-age story, but rather a bleak, emotionally honest reflection of adolescence shaped by constraint, rage, and unspoken grief.

Thank you to NetGalley and Spiegel & Grau for an eARC in exchange for my honest review.

Real Rating: 4.5* of fiveGaia narrates this story to us, in all her adolescent angst, pain, confusion, bewilderment...all the usual things an adolescent in the middle of the utterly mystifying process of finding out who she is, what she wants, how she's going to set about getting it, feels.

That does not sound like a book I'd like very much. And yet you see those four stars up there. Where'd they come from?

From a scaffolding that wasn't safe. From a stable that showed Gaia she didn't have the power to heal the wounds betrayal leaves. From a bag of rotting lemons, from a carnival shooting game, from texts that can't be answered...from, in other words, life as it is lived. Piece by piece.

Watching in real-time someone coming of age is *maddening* because you're helpless. Reading a novel about a young woman becoming herself is both faster and friendlier on the patience. Gaia's got a hard row to hoe in this life, her entire family's very badly broken in real, honest ways. That leaves her to do what she can with what she's got, and that is never enough. Nothing is ever enough when you're working on, working out, yourself. You paste together the bits you can find, then paper over the holes and cracks and voids. It is how humans have always done it, don't be fooled by fools telling you it used to be easier, it was better when..."when" is the slipperiest word in English. "When" never comes, never came, isn't coming, got lost. "When" immigrated from Old Frisia, from Proto-Indo-Europe whatever wherever whenever that happened. Who needs "when" because we have "now."

And "now" is Gaia's native land.

It was clear to me the story here was not purely foundationally fiction. The author says so in her last word on the subject. She's Gaia; other girls from her past were Iris and Agata. It doesn't help, particularly, to know that but it does make me trust the author more. She's honest; she wrote a novel about realness by using reality, and one person's reality is never, ever enough...see above...for a whole novel. It's too much and never enough, like Mary Trump says. We're not enough for fiction; we're too much for Life. It's a puzzlement, remember Yul Brynner talking those lines on pitch? And no king like The King and I ever spoke greater sooth. Imagine not feeling puzzled! Imagine feeling so sure of yourself that you, a teen anarchist boy, run your family! Imagine how *little* you feel in the face of Life, and you power through anyway, and rotten-souled bastards take your life, your living, your family's home.

Imagine.

And yet here we are. Absolutely in the same place we were, only without instead of with.

Read The Lake's Water Is Never Sweet by Giulia Caminito as translated by Hope Campbell Gustafson and imagine.

Thank you Netgalley & Spiegel & Grau for an eARC ♥️♥️♥️

This isn’t just a book—it’s an experience♥️. Reading it feels like overhearing someone’s most private thoughts, the kind you weren’t meant to hear but can’t stop listening to.
Gaia, the teenage girl at the heart of the story, isn’t some polished literary heroine. She’s messy, angry, vulnerable, and so real I kept forgetting she wasn’t someone I actually knew.
Her family:
The mom who loves you but doesn’t understand you, the dad who’s physically there but emotionally checked out, the brother who’s off doing his own reckless thing—it’s all so painfully recognizable. Caminito writes these relationships without judgment, letting them be as complicated and contradictory as real families are. 💔

And the writing
It’s not showy or pretentious, just devastatingly precise. She’ll drop a single line about the way light falls on a lake or the weight of unsaid words between people, and suddenly you’re gutted. The whole book hums with this quiet intensity, like a tension you can’t shake.
What I love most is that it doesn’t tie things up neatly. Life isn’t like that, and neither is Gaia’s story. She makes mistakes, she hurts people, she gets hurt, and none of it gets magically fixed. It’s just her, figuring it out as she goes—which is all any of us are really doing, right?
If you’ve ever felt like you didn’t belong, if your family drives you crazy but you’d still take a bullet for them, if you’ve ever been so angry or lost you didn’t know what to do with yourself—read this. It’s brutal and beautiful at the same time💔

Fantastic coming of age story set in and around Rome.

There are certain memories from growing up that take up more space in your mind and this mirrored that experience by having some scenes shine very brightly.

Near the start she takes part in a shooting game at a carnival and at this point I knew I would enjoy this book.

There is also a scene near the end around the kitchen table with her mother which was so true and heartbreaking.

But my favourite part was when she is trying to catch a train with her first boyfriend. I had so many feelings about that and it was written so evocatively.

There were many great lines, but one that encapsulated growing up from so many different angles. “My mother wants to extend her dominion from my childhood into my adulthood”.

In the 1990s, Gaia’s family moves from the neglected peripheries of Rome to an idyllic lakeside town twenty miles away, in search of a new life that will lift them out of poverty. Each of them bears their own scars: Gaia’s strong-willed mother is fiercely determined to secure a better future for her children at any cost; her father, a once proud man, now suffers in bitter silence after a devastating accident; her anarchist older brother rebels against the political apathy he sees at home; and her young twin brothers wordlessly bear witness to a family in decay.

I just couldn’t get going with this story. It was disjointed and just doesn’t flow for me despite a couple of attempts. I gave up about a third of the way through. Maybe it’s the writing style or the translation. Or maybe it’s just me. It didn’t work.

A chaotic, awkward coming of age story - exactly what that age is about! Gaia is nearly friendless, has red hair that stands out, uncomfortable in her own skin. Perhaps the start of an 'ugly duckling' story, she has anger and bitterness. The location of this story is set in several locations in and around Rome and her family moves from aparment to apartment, all in downtrodden areas. Her father fell off of a scaffolding on a work site and was left paralyzed from the waist down, so he can no longer work. Her mother is relentless - pushing her to academic excellence, pursuing stable housing for her family - Gaia, an older brother, younger twin brothers, her father. This fall into economic hardship takes its emotional toll on Gaia, and her story is often difficult to read. The characters get under your skin as the story progresses and the writing is a bit disjointed, which feels to me to set the correct tone. It's a peak into the mind of a confused teen who feels like an outsider in her own body.

This ARC was provided by NetGalley and the publisher, the opinions expressed herein are strictly my own.