Strega

Title:

Strega

Uniform Title:

Strega. English

Author:

Holm, Johanne Lykke, 1987- author.

Added Author:

Vogel, Saskia,

Personal Author:

Holm, Johanne Lykke, 1987- author.

ISBN:

9780593539675

Physical Description:

199 pages ; 22 cm

General Note:

Translated from the Swedish.

Abstract:

"With toiletries, hairbands, and notebooks in her bag, and at her mother's instruction, a nineteen-year-old girl leaves her parents' home and the seaside town she grew up in. Out the train window, Rafa sees the lit-up mountains and perfect trees-and the Olympic Hotel waiting for her perched above the small village of Strega. There, she and eight other girls receive the stiff black uniforms of seasonal workers and move into their shared dorm. But while they toil constantly to perform their role and prepare the hotel for guests, none arrive. Instead, they contort themselves daily to the expectations of their strict, matronly bosses without clear purpose and, in their spare moments, escape to the herb garden, confide in each other, and quickly find solace together. Finally, the hotel is filled with people for a wild and raucous party, only for one of the girls to disappear. What follows are deeper revelations about the myths we teach young women, what we raise them to expect from the world, and whether a gentler, more beautiful life is possible. In stimulating and uninhibited imagery, Johanne Lykke Holm builds a world laced with the supernatural, filled with the secrecy and potential energy of girls on the cusp of womanhood. An allegory for the societal rites and expectations of women and the violence we too easily allow, Strega builds like a spell that keeps exerting its powers long after reading"-- Provided by publisher.

Subject Term:

Young women -- Fiction.

Missing persons -- Fiction.

Geographic Term:

Genre:

Summary:

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... Belmont	Book	FICTION HOLM	Searching... Unknown
Searching... East End	Book	FICTION HOLM	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Ginter Park	Book	FICTION HOLM	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Hull Street	Book	FICTION HOLM	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Main Library	Book	FICTION HOLM	Searching... Unknown
Searching... West End	Book	FICTION HOLM	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Westover Hills	Book	FICTION HOLM	Searching... Unknown

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On Order

Summary

"Strega left me breathless, angry, and then thrilled by the dare it leaves in the reader's lap." --Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Thrust and The Chronology of Water

Powerfully inventive and atmospheric, a modern gothic story of nine young women sent to work at a remote Alpine hotel and what happens when one of them goes missing

With toiletries, hairbands, and notebooks in her bag, and at her mother's instruction, a nineteen-year-old girl leaves her parents' home and the seaside town she grew up in. Out the train window, Rafa sees the lit-up mountains and perfect trees--and the Olympic Hotel waiting for her perched above the small village of Strega. There, she and eight other girls receive the stiff black uniforms of seasonal workers and move into their shared dorm. But while they toil constantly to perform their role and prepare the hotel for guests, none arrive. Instead, they contort themselves daily to the expectations of their strict, matronly bosses without clear purpose and, in their spare moments, escape to the herb garden, confide in each other, and quickly find solace together. Finally, the hotel is filled with people for a wild and raucous party, only for one of the girls to disappear. What follows are deeper revelations about the myths we teach young women, what we raise them to expect from the world, and whether a gentler, more beautiful life is possible.

In stimulating and uninhibited imagery, Johanne Lykke Holm builds a world laced with the supernatural, filled with the secrecy and potential energy of girls on the cusp of womanhood. An allegory for the societal rites, expectations of women, and violence we too easily allow, Strega builds like a spell that keeps exerting its powers long after reading.

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

A young woman goes to work as a housekeeper at a hotel that remains curiously without guests in this disquieting and elegiac novel from a Swedish writer. Rafaela, the first-person narrator, grew up near the sea, and she never dreamed of taking a job in the mountain town of Strega, but after her mother comes across the Olympic Hotel's want ad for "nine maids for the winter season," she applies for a position out of a sense of duty. She soon finds herself in the beautiful and desolate hotel--alone except for her fellow seasonal hires and three members of the permanent staff. The new girls are rigorously trained in hospitality and hotel upkeep and given strange lectures on servile womanhood, electricity, and the nuns living at a nearby convent, but days and then weeks go by without anyone ever renting a room. Lykke Holm builds a sense of aimless unease as the housekeepers inure themselves to days of seemingly senseless work and harsh punishment from their managers, and Rafaela falls into a homoerotic friendship with a fellow maid. Right as the tension begins to tilt toward tediousness, a local holiday brings strangers to the Olympic for a party, and one of the maids disappears. The search for Cassie and grief over her disappearance form an interesting engine for the latter half of the book--as do Rafaela's musings on women's bodies as inevitable crime scenes--but the persistent ambiguity about what is and isn't real occasionally feels like indecisiveness on the part of the author and prevents it from satisfying as a mystery. Lykke Holm's prose--full of litanies of strange and striking imagery--is, without a doubt, the book's greatest strength. An unsettling and melancholy dreamscape that leans more on aesthetics than on plot. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.