Strega

October 15, 2022
At 19, Rafaela leaves her parents to live in a mountainous village called Strega and work with eight other young women at Hotel Olympic, a dilapidated place that holds echoes of past grandeur. Regardless of their background, each of these young women hopes for a better life. The women work hard to keep the hotel clean and strictly adhere to their regimented schedule, but guests never arrive. Rafaela and her coworkers find companionship as they exchange stories and share secrets during brief moments away from the intimidating eyes of their bosses. After a wild masquerade at the hotel, one of the girls is discovered missing. When a days-long search uncovers nothing but the girl's dress in the forest, she's assumed dead, leading to imagined visions of what life might be like for these women if they were free from society's expectations. In her first novel published in the U.S., Swedish author Holm masterfully uses imagery and symbolism, offering a modern Gothic allegory of the often degrading treatment of and expectations placed on young women.

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Starred review from October 24, 2022
Translator Holm’s stylish and spellbinding gothic debut follows a group of nine young women who arrive for seasonal work at the Olympic Hotel near the remote Alpine village of Strega. The hotel, once a playground for the rich, now sits empty, and the women spend their days cleaning and preparing for guests who never arrive. Punchy, rhythmic sentences capture the mixture of boredom and anticipation that permeates their work. Amid the routine, the narrator, Rafa, develops a bond with Alba, but their idyll is broken when a festival brings a raucous party of guests to the hotel. That night, after one of the women performs a dance routine for the guests, she disappears. A subsequent search yields nothing but her dress, which Alba finds. Holm has a sure hand in conveying the atmosphere of dread that ensues and colors Rafa and Alba’s relationship as the women resume their routine and summer winds to a close. Rafa’s narration, meanwhile, crystallizes into an unsettling reckoning with her vulnerability in which she contemplates how “a girl’s life could at any point be turned into a crime scene.” Readers won’t be able to turn away from this gorgeous and captivating work.

November 15, 2022
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.

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