For fans of Elena Ferrante. A story about first friendships and first loves. Lots of depth, but at times it felt so fast paced. Culturally, I think there’s a few things I misunderstood. Thanks to the publisher, Spiegel & Grau, the author, and NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review. The book will be published in the States in July 2025.

I really did try to read this book, but it felt unnecessary inflammatory for me personally. Some readers may like the book, but I think a Trigger Warning section needs to be created. Giving a standard 4 star review as I only read about half the book.

Packed full of emotions, I feel lucky to be one of the first to read the English translation of this powerhouse of a novel. Gaia is headstrong, stubborn and deeply flawed. Her emotions overweight her thoughts and she often makes decisions that aren’t right. But that’s what makes her brilliant as a character. She made me laugh and cry and her life was an endless loop of moments that made her. I loved reading about her dysfunctional and deeply angry family, her brother and mother share her stubbornness whereas her father is almost a “houseplant” as she describes him.

Everything in this book was teeming with life. It felt so incredibly real, the Italian sun shone through the pages as did the blood, sweat and tears of Gaia. Although the timeline was a little confusing at points, this works well overall to paint an unreliable narrative. A truly compelling story with so many beautiful moments and heartbreaking ones as well.

Lovely scene setting and writing. There is so much tension and the pages are simmering with Gaia’s fury.

Ultimately, I both enjoyed the story and found it to be too bleak.

Thank you very much to Spiegel & Grau and NetGalley for the opportunity to read a copy.

Excellent from the story to the descriptions to the characters. I loved this book everything about it, it transported me to rome and into the very characters beings. Excellently translated.

This felt like the younger, more unhinged version of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Series - in the best way. The Lake’s Water is Never Sweet is a coming of age story for the millennials. Though it’s set in Italy and I grew up in small town England, I felt a huge affinity with our protagonist. The growing pains of adolescence and the general existential crises we experience as teenagers really made this novel feel especially, sweetly nostalgic.

Special mention must be made for the incredibly complex and well rounded characters. I especially absolutely love whenever Antonia appeared, and I think Caminito does an exceptional job at representing the love and strain between mother and daughter across generations.

In short: I loved it.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced reading copy in exchange for an honest review.

Giulia Caminito’s The Lake’s Water Is Never Sweet is a fiercely compelling coming-of-age story set in 1988 Italy. Gaia and her family move to Lake Bracciano, chasing the promise of a better life. What unfolds is a richly detailed journey of adolescence as Gaia navigates friendship, love, and school challenges while grappling with the shadow of poverty and her desire to break free from its confines.

Echoing the emotional depth of My Brilliant Friend, the novel explores themes of anger, survival, and class through the lens of Gaia’s dysfunctional family and her relentless, often tumultuous, drive to carve out her identity. Gaia’s mother, a standout character, is as commanding as she is complex, anchoring the story with her unyielding spirit.

Winner of the Campiello Prize, this novel is both a raw portrayal of societal struggles and a beautifully written exploration of resilience. A must-read for fans of literary fiction that doesn’t shy away from life’s harsher realities.

#spiegelandgrau #thelakeswaterisneversweet #giuliacaminito

The Lake’s Water is Never Sweet is a coming-of-age novel about a working class young Italian woman growing up under the tyranny of her mother just outside of Rome in the early 2000s. Whilst Caminito has some beautiful prose about the natural world, this is not a sweet or sentimental novel, Rather it is a novel about politics, class, money and rage, intriguingly centred in the voice of studious and well-behaved Gaia whose anger is unleashed at climatic moments throughout the novel, Caminito writes of the struggle of being a child positioned amidst wealthy peers by ambitious parents and the pent up frustration that this can build. It’s also an inherently feminist novel as it’s about how the female characters struggle with their place and status within town. A very interesting and competently written/translated novel but I’m afraid it just didn’t sing for me, potentially due to the absence of any real sense of decision making from any character other than the powerful matriarch Antonia who ruled them all,

A gorgeously heartbreaking book. It tells the story of a working class mother trying to keep her family together and a young daughter, trying to find herself and make her own way. It follows an Italian family from an impoverished area of Rome to a tranquil, sleepy lakeside town. Gaia never thought she’d fit in with her fiery red hair and her hand-me-downs, but cultivates relationships of different sorts. However, her anger at life, her station, her family’s reputation, threatens to destroy. This, coupled with feelings of betrayal dominate in this book. This story was filled with such feeling, such longing, such palpable heartbreak.

Thank you to NetGalley, Giulia Caminito, and Spiegel & Grau for the opportunity to read the ARC of The Lake's Water Is Never Sweet. This compelling novel delves into identity, memory, and resilience through an unreliable narrator whose name is only revealed at the very end. The fragmented timeline, reminiscent of diary entries, adds an intimate and raw tone to the storytelling. The vivid portrayal of Italian village life makes the world-building strikingly realistic. I especially loved the feminist undertones and the nuanced exploration of childhood, friendship, and romance. This was beautifully written

Excellent read. Great descriptive language and prose. The characters were well developed and plot well thought out.

This book is a work of fiction, although it feels and reads much like a memoir. In fact, it feels so much like a memoir that in the author’s notes at the end, Caminito states that specific events in the novel were fictional and they did not actually take place. The story focuses on Gaia, a teenager living on the fringes of Rome with her family – father, brother and mother, a larger-than-life figure with flaming red hair, known as Antonia the redhead, who fought against the circumstances of her family’s poverty. The story takes place over the 1990s into the early 2000s when the family moves from Rome to Anguillara Sabazia, a small town on Lake Bracciano around 30 kilometres from Rome. We follow Gaia’s coming of age and her struggles with family, friends, boys and school.

Throughout the novel, we experience life through Gaia’s eyes. Her descriptions of their poverty and rejection from society are so visceral and realistic we can taste their humiliation. Her life improves with their move to the lakeside town even as her brother’s relationship with Antonia the redhead deteriorates; and he is compelled to move in with their grandmother. Caminito vividly depicts the casual cruelties and betrayals of teenage friendship, and the raging emotions and feelings of impotent helplessness of those years suspended between childhood and adulthood. All this is immersed in the watery stillness of the lakeside town, where the children still repeat ancient legends about a town at the bottom of the lake where statues and spires can still be seen on a crystal-clear day. It is an unforgettable read. Sincere thanks to Spiegel and Grau for the copy to read.

the lakes water is never sweet
Another promising member of the niche Italian translated bildungsroman novel that Ferrante heads the case for, The River’s Water Is Never Sweet is the English language debut of the Italian award winning author Giulia Caminito; Our main character is Gaia, a young daughter in an increasingly angry and stubbornly persevering family, a family fraught with rage, grief, strong wills and this uncompromising stubbornness that just barely keeps them living above the poverty line, while also providing a lot of distance and tension between them. Gaia inherits her mothers anger, and she turns it outward, baring her teeth at a world she has only known to treat her unfairly. She makes a handful of friends, has a few boyfriends, and these relationships all burn at the edges, Gaia unwilling to put a fire out once she’s started it, instead preferring to fade into a thin smoke and descend into teeming solitude. Our cast of characters start to seemingly become such as well to Gaia, her inner universe so dense that she sees others as simply peripheral, annoying obstacles or like a mole you forget is there and you mean to remove someday. This novel reminded me in many ways of “We Run The Tides” by Vendela Vida, another book highlighting the uncontainable rage of the teenage girl, the betrayal so tempting in upper grade school female relationships, the urges as a girl to take retribution against the boys and men who taunt and harass you. To be a teenage girl is sometimes to be a kind of volcano, being driven to erupt by conflicting pressures, so overcome by your own burning substance that you lose yourself and in that overflow of émotion subsequently burn everyone around you. A fiery and angry girlhood can easily turn into a cold and lonely womanhood, the hot lava inside of you always bubbling close the edge, either inside or out; when it cools it stays there. The novels end felt a bit unsatisfying in ways, but in a way I guess it was a sensible step back, a return to a bitter center. If you enjoy novels on the fiery anger and naive experimental nature of teenage girlhood, and appreciate Italian translated literature, I think you’ll like this one.

I was very excited to receive this ARC and really looking forward to reading it, but now that I've finished it I feel a bit sad and hopeless.

I think this is a really interesting portrayal of teenage girl rage.

Gaia is a memorable character and she is usually angry. There are happy moments here and there: the summer of reading with Iris, receiving the dictionary, improving her scores at school. But more than that we get the sense of anger, anger at her housing situation, he mom, her financial situation, jealousy of her friends hanging out without her, etc. It's understandable but a bit overwhelming.

It's a heartbreaking book.

Gaia is an unforgettable protagonist, her struggles and ambitions shaped by the circumstances of her family’s relocation from urban poverty to a seemingly idyllic lakeside town. Her mother’s fierce determination and her father’s silent despair create a home filled with tension, ambition, and unspoken pain, while her anarchist brother and watchful younger siblings round out a family fighting against the tides of their fractured reality.

The friendships Gaia forms with Agata and Carlotta are as tender as they are precarious. As Gaia navigates bullying, betrayal, and the harsh judgments of her peers and elders, her alienation deepens, forcing her to turn inward. This inward journey is beautifully, heartbreakingly rendered, capturing the loneliness and fury of a girl grappling with her place in an unforgiving world.

After a tragedy within Gaia’s friend group, the narrative takes a darker turn, and the emotional fallout is profound. As her friends drift away and her family continues to fracture, Gaia’s transformation into someone driven by anger and resentment feels both inevitable and deeply tragic. The novel’s raw portrayal of her descent—and her vow to make the world pay for its injustices—is as chilling as it is sympathetic.

The novel is unflinching in its depiction of societal and class divides, showing how these forces shape and often limit the lives of those caught in their grasp.

This powerful, emotionally resonant novel lingers in the mind long after its final pages. With its richly drawn characters and masterful exploration of pain, resilience, and the yearning for something more, it’s a story that demands to be read, discussed and remembered.

The publisher provided ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

In her notes at the end of this book author Giulia Caminito tells us that, "The Lake's Water is Never Sweet" is based on her life and some of the people in it but isn't autobiographical . She also says that some of those recognising themselves in it won't like what they read, something I can believe as most of the characters are odd,unpleasant,selfish or even borderline psychotic,not least main character Gaia who has a touch of all of those.
The book follows Gaia through her young life,and a series of homes , through adolescence until early adulthood. From an early age Gaia feels like a misfit with her big ears,ragged clothes and messy Ginger hair, she is however resilient and finds things she excels at,not least dealing with bullies in a cold-blooded and terrifying way.

When I read ,after finishing the story,that the book was based loosely on some of her own fictionalised experiences I wondered if this was a confessional, payback to some of those who wronged her or a combination of both.
Whether it's either,both or neither of those things it's a dark and moody coming of age story showing that life for young women is a minefield in so many ways, physically and psychologically . The characters are believable and complex, if usually flawed.
An excellent book on many levels.

The Lake's Water is Never Sweet by Giulia Caminito is a raw, intense exploration of poverty, class, and resilience, all wrapped in hauntingly vivid prose. The story follows Gaia, a young woman navigating life in a small Italian lakeside town after her family relocates from the outskirts of Rome. Her mother’s relentless ambition to escape poverty clashes with Gaia’s growing anger and disillusionment, creating a tense, deeply emotional narrative.

I found the book gripping but heavy, with its unflinching depiction of hardship and alienation—Gaia’s internal struggles really stuck with me. The lake, almost a character itself, adds an eerie and symbolic layer to the story. While it’s not a light read, it’s beautifully written and thought-provoking, perfect for anyone who loves literary fiction with strong emotional undercurrents. If you liked books that dive deep into class dynamics and fractured families, this is definitely worth checking out.

I really enjoyed reading this, it had that element that I was looking for from the description. The overall story worked and had characters that I was looking for. Giulia Caminito wrote this perfectly and I was engaged with the story being told. Everything was really well done and can’t wait for more.