The Lake's Water is Never Sweet was tough reading for me. Some of it was purely formatting - this ARC is unpolished and leaves a lot to be desired. But more importantly, the story felt all over the place. It felt like big gaps in time jumped forward with no warning. The main event, at which the story is supposed to take a turning point, was glossed over and, then again, the timeline moved seemingly backward in a way that made me wonder if the event had happened. This type of read makes me wonder: is this a badly edited ARC or will the final print be just as all discombobulated?

I wanted to like this story. Gaia is an interesting character. Her family is interesting. The story is interesting. But the telling lost me.

While I appreciate the ARC in exchange for an honest review, I cannot recommend The Lake's Water is Never Sweet.

This is an award winning Italian novel newly translated into English. It is probably one of the best portraits of a woman coming of age I’ve ever read. Gaia, the protagonist, is introduced as a child and we see her experiences through adolescence.

The book opens with a heartbreaking scene. Gaia’s mother has tried to take on the persona of a professional woman with an appointment to demand the housing she has been promised. It is with this opening, we are taken on a ride through a family teetering on the edge, holding on to the little they have, optimistic for a better future.

Antonia is a powerful maternal figure. Her life has been a series of disappointments. She is determined that her daughter, Gaia, will break free of this cycle of poverty. But she rules with an iron hand, giving her daughter little breathing room.

The family is comprised of an older son, Mariano, who has a father out of the picture, Gaia and younger twin sons. Her husband was injured in a work accident that left him immobilized with no compensation. Unable to find housing in Rome, they are sent to a small town on Rome’s outskirts to live in a social housing project built on an ancient lake. Everything about it is dreary and inhospitable.

Gaia grows up here. In her mind, things will never get better. Antonia harshly regulates her life because she still believes education is the way out. Gaia is a fascinating character and I was struck by her visceral rage. She has the experiences of a teen —love, friendship, loss, adventure—but never feels part of things. She is the embodiment of unrealistic expectations, jealousy of the ease of others’ lives, and deeply felt loneliness. Her angst grows along with the bleakness of her life.

The backdrop is just right. The lake defines the dreary setting. Supposedly there is a nativity scene that can be seen rising from beneath it. It is murky and there is a danger to it that the author uses to its full potential. Her writing style also drew me in. The quick moving around of story from chapter to chapter as well as the breathiness in her long lists of things Gaia was either thinking or experiencing, heightened the mood.

Gaia is a memorable character. As her despair grows, she loses control and her growing violence and the sadness that accompanies it, rings true. She is a victim of society’s promises and what happens to people who are depending on a sense of fairness that never comes. Her mother forces herself to remain hopeful. She never gives up. What can Gaia take from that?

What strikes hard is the realization that maybe the cycle of poverty can't be broken..

Highly recommend.
Many thanks to Netgalley and Spiel & Grau for the opportunity to read this advanced reading copy and provide and honest review.

Giulia Caminito’s The Lake’s Water is Never Sweet is a compelling, introspective coming-of-age novel that explores themes of identity, family dysfunction, and the complexity of friendships against the backdrop of a rapidly changing Italy in the 1990s. Through the eyes of Gaia, a young woman caught between the poverty of her past and the disappointments of her present, the novel offers a striking portrayal of the challenges faced by a generation yearning for a better life yet confronted with personal and societal obstacles at every turn.

Gaia’s family’s move to a picturesque lakeside town is supposed to represent a fresh start, a new beginning away from the harsh realities of their impoverished existence in Rome. However, the idyllic setting only serves as a fragile mask over the deep fractures within the family. Her mother’s unrelenting determination to build a better future clashes with her father’s quiet despair after a tragic accident, while her anarchist brother’s rebellion and the silent suffering of her younger brothers highlight the emotional toll of their situation. Gaia’s family becomes a microcosm of larger societal disillusionment, with each member struggling to survive within the constraints of their circumstances.

The friendship between Gaia and two local girls, Agata and Carlotta, is poignant yet fraught with insecurity and jealousy, perfectly capturing the turbulence of adolescence. Their bond is tested by the callousness of boys and the unfeeling attitudes of teachers, both of which reinforce Gaia’s belief that she will never truly fit in. This sense of alienation is deepened by her mother’s constant pressure for excellence, which drives Gaia inward, causing her to retreat into herself.

As the story unfolds, Gaia’s evolving relationships and the tragedy that strikes her friend group propel her towards a more isolated, hardened self. The novel’s exploration of Gaia’s emotional journey is both raw and nuanced, capturing the tension between her desire for connection and her self-preserving anger. Caminito’s writing, marked by psychological depth and vivid imagery, perfectly conveys the internal chaos Gaia experiences as she grapples with her own sense of worth and her place in the world.

The Lake’s Water is Never Sweet is a deeply moving portrayal of a young woman’s struggle to find meaning and identity in a world that constantly challenges her. The novel paints a powerful picture of how bitterness and vulnerability coexist within the human soul, often masked by the external personas we project. Caminito’s exploration of generational trauma, social expectations, and the complexities of friendships makes this novel a poignant reflection on the pressures of growing up and finding one’s voice in a fractured world.

For readers who appreciate emotionally complex narratives and literary prose, The Lake’s Water is Never Sweet offers a gripping, contemplative experience. It is a novel that lingers long after the final page, inviting reflection on the nature of family, self-worth, and the quest for belonging.

Read more at The Secret Book Review.

This was absolutely beautiful. The writing was gorgeous and the story was told in such a unique and enthralling manner. This took me a minute to get into but when I did I was HOOKED it was so so beautiful I can’t say that enough I was constantly in awe of Caminitos prose. Thank you to NetGalley for the arc of this book, set to release July 8th 2025.

This is a story of a family that has had hard luck, a father that had an accident at work and is lame and a mother who works mostly as a house cleaner all while taking care of her four children. The story is not only about the family and their desire for a home, but how they navigate life as they are always on the margins of society and how it shapes their brilliant daughter Gaia.

As they move to a seaside town to begin anew, Gaia is allowed to go to a more privileged school among a richer crowd of kids. She wears her bitterness on her selves and pushes away her family, even drives her friends crazy. Academically she shines and manages to do very well in school to get herself into university. The problem is that she is smart but doesn’t have a dream for her life. She struggles to navigate the bulling and her family circumstances to build her own life away from the confines of her poverty and pressures from her mother. Her other brother also has issues with the world, and then there are the twins, young and tied to the mother’s apron strings.

The book is insightful and he writes clearly of the bitterness of what it is like to live in Italy and not have money. The family doesn’t have a safety net and the bureaucracy drives the mother into desperate acts.

The book is thoughtful with a clear and precise story but no happy ending. Even being smart you need a dream and opportunities to move forward. The author captures the minds and movements of young people with great clarity and makes us wonder how to best be prepared for the world.

The Lake's Water Is Never Sweet by Giulia Caminito is BRILLIANT! Reminiscent of Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, I reveled in every beautifully crafted sentence, so descriptive and raw that I felt the gut punch in my stomach! This woman is an incredible writer, I lingered on every word.
This story also takes place in Italy, in public housing where this young girl, whose name one doesn't find out till midstory, grows up with all the accoutrements that young girls have, all the uncertainties, all the unsureness of life, all the hangups and all the unworthiness! This is certainly a coming of age book, but one that is even better. The mother, Antonia Columbo, is one of the stars of this book, and the dad, well, that is simply too painful for my words. You must read this book.
For me, it is one of the top 5 books I have read this year!

Thank you, Ms. Caminito, for the brilliance of your written word!

It's very rare these days to find a book where the plot is not the main focus, but the characters and the writing are, and I found that in this novel. It is fast paced, sharp, and witty in all the best ways.
The Lake's Water is Never Sweet by Giuia Caminito follows the early life, relationships, and inner turmoil of an Italian girl in the early 2000s whose name is not revealed until 90% through. Through her eyes, the author takes the reader on a riveting, beautifully written, and at times heartbreaking exploration of class, girlhood, femininity, friendship, and rage.
This book made me cry more than a book has in months. I was highlighting like crazy. Caminito portrayed female friendships and feminine rage masterfully. This book made me feel seen, even though I couldn't always relate to the characters.
The main character is angry, bitter, strong, and all together not a good person. That didn't stop me from loving her and her fiery personality. In fact, I found her one of the most interesting female characters I have read in a while.
The term female rage has always confused me on some level, but I think I understand it now. This novel IS female rage in its purest form. The women in this book and their complex relationships are built with intimate love and care that could only come from experience.
The novel is complex and intricately handled, but entirely readable. The writing is stunning, even translated from Italian, and I'm glad to see the translator did not attempt to change the prose to more English writing conventions.
I would 100% percent recommend this book to those who are unafraid to tackle hard subjects and like complex characters. Thank you so much to Netgalley and the publisher for sending me this ARC. I hope this book gets the love and praise it deserves when it gets its US release this summer. The Lake's Water Is Never Sweet places in my top three books of the year.

**Content warnings: graphic suicide, mentions of rape, alcohol, chronic illness, guns, violence, brief mention of an eating disorder

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.