It’s perhaps appropriate that İnci Atrek’s debut, HOLIDAY COUNTRY, has its publication date in early January. Suffused with the heat and sunshine of the Aegean coast, the novel could not feel more alluring and seductive at any other time of year.

The Turkish American narrator, 19-year-old Ada, inextricably associates this environment with the summer holidays. As long as she can remember, she has traveled from California with her mother, who grew up in Turkey, back to this small resort town to spend summers with her grandmother. Like many first-generation kids, Ada views her life as being split in two, just like her year. She feels alienated from her American life and the aspirations of her American boyfriend, whom she met at Stanford. But she is consistently frustrated by her stumbling with the Turkish language and her inability to recognize or appreciate certain Turkish cultural touchstones, such as a particularly famous Turkish movie actor.

"[R]eaders will savor the sights, sounds and tastes of the Aegean... Atrek capably captures Ada’s moment at the brink of adulthood.... HOLIDAY COUNTRY is a skillfully balanced coming-of-age novel."

This summer, unlike others from Ada’s childhood, feels especially fraught. Her father has admitted to an affair. Although she implicitly blames her mother for his infidelity, partly because the two are separated for such a significant portion of each year, she knows that exciting changes could be coming for her mother. Perhaps this is a chance for her to reclaim the more youthful, carefree part of herself that Ada always imagined she left behind in Turkey when she immigrated to America.

These new possibilities seem to solidify in Levent, a charismatic man and newcomer to the resort town, where he’s taking a break from his managerial job in Istanbul. When she finds out that Levent and her mother knew each other in their youth, Ada sparks a plan to reunite the one-time lovebirds. But even after she learns the far more complicated history of their relationship, Ada’s feelings toward the man have changed. She starts to fancy him not for her mother but for herself.

At least initially, HOLIDAY COUNTRY has something of the feelings of a vacation in a resort town; the pace is languid and somewhat aimless, and its timeframe can seem to grow fuzzy. Things speed up considerably (perhaps even a tad too hurriedly) in the story’s final third. But until then, readers will savor the sights, sounds and tastes of the Aegean, spending time with Ada and her friends as they play board games and enjoy each other’s company.

Atrek capably captures Ada’s moment at the brink of adulthood. Although Ada is flirting with very adult decisions about relationships and sex (not to mention very adult lessons about betrayal and trust), she’s also still juvenile: worried about gossip when she makes a misstep, consuming endless junk food, and hatching a plan to be (possibly) the first ones to swim to the islands off the coast.

In that way, HOLIDAY COUNTRY is a skillfully balanced coming-of-age novel. A young woman is constantly reevaluating her impressions of those around her --- particularly her mother and grandmother --- while also, for better or worse, establishing a sense of herself, regardless of where in the world she finds herself.