When fourteen-year-old Irene Beverley's family uproots from London to Naples, she trades the familiar grey skies of England for the sun-drenched Italian coast and a boarding school unlike anything she could have imagined. Villa Camellia, a school for English-speaking girls, becomes her new world: a place of foreign languages, new friendships, and the delicious terror of navigating adolescence in a land where everything from the food to the customs feels slightly, thrillingly strange. Angela Brazil, a pioneer of the girls' school story, captures that particular adolescent anxiety of wanting to belong while also craving adventure with an energy that still crackles a century later. This is a book about the bravery it takes to walk into a room where no one knows your name, and the unexpected joy of discovering that the scariest changes often lead to the best chapters of your life.
