This novel was OK. Silvia Avallone renders the setting of Swimming to Elba very vividly, and there are moments of really sharp insight and beautiful descriptive writing. Too often, though, I found the style a bit disappointing, like I could really tell it was a first novel. Perhaps something got lost in translation. The relationship between the two main characters, girls in their early teens growing up in a declining coastal town in Italy, was interesting: a friend recommended this book to me because she said that few books explore relationships between female friends of that age, or the developing sense of sexual self-awareness of girls, and I agree. The mixed feelings of attraction and revulsion, and the consciousness of having your body appraised by male eyes, seemed very authentic. The roller disco scene in particular sticks in my mind. In a way, though, the constantly switching viewpoint and the descriptive narrative undermined how real the characters felt to me. Other reviewers below write about feeling shocked at the sexualisation of such young girls, and I was at first, but later I wasn't. For the last 100 pages or so, I wasn't convinced that the girls really were plausible fourteen year olds (though perhaps that was wishful thinking, given the course of events) and although I cared about what happened to them and the whole cast of characters, I felt distanced from them. Still, I'm glad I read Swimming to Elba and its strong sense of place made me curious to read more Italian fiction.