Laura lives alone in a cabin deep within the Italian Alps, making her living translating medical documents and tutoring the children of affluent locals. She spends her days climbing the mountains outside her door and exploring the woods, and when she must venture into the small, conservative town for supplies, she's met with curious stares and wariness. Laura begins seeing a bartender, who alerts her to the villagers' uncertainties. Then late one night there is a knock on the door, and on the other side stands someone from her past who has finally found her. In beguiling, lyrical prose, the mystery surrounding why Laura has absconded to this remote corner of the Alps comes into focus, while the villagers grow leery of the woman in the cabin and of her increasingly odd behavior. A few decide to take matters into their own hands, to free themselves from the malevolent forces of the strega who lives amongst them.
Accomplished ... The novel is a slow-burner, and Bromwich has the confidence to allow her story to build incrementally through the early chapters ... A novel that invites full immersion on the reader’s part; the reward is a deeply unsettling exploration of what it means to inhabit a female body but to reject femininity, and to feel a connection with the natural world that embodies both awe and terror. In this, its themes could not be more timely.
Bromwich paints Laura and her woods as vibrantly as an old-fashioned fairy tale and this is just as foreboding. Fans of highly interiorized, richly narrated feminist fiction will tear through it.
Haunting ... The result is a slow-burning tension that never quite resolves into something like closure but is nonetheless riveting and original. A gripping, richly layered story of a woman’s unraveling as she grapples with threats both past and present.
