Giovanna tells her coming-of-age story from the first-person perspective, drawing readers into her shifting thoughts so they experience adolescence alongside her. She begins the novel as a precocious 13-year-old who wants what her parents want: a happy life guided by refinement, intellect, and routine. Yet Giovanna’s life is already changing in a way that troubles her: She gets her period, her body and face change shape, and men take more notice of her. Her father intensifies these changes by saying that Giovanna resembles his evil sister Aunt Vittoria. Giovanna then conflates her entry into adolescence with a growing evil, an evil that will overtake her once her adolescent face fully forms and fully resembles Aunt Vittoria. Much of the novel involves Giovanna struggling with mental and physical changes and with whether these changes mean she is becoming a spiteful, bad person.

Though Giovanna learns that adults lie, she also realizes that she too can alter her reality by lying. She begins lying to the people she loves while also embracing what she initially perceives as a darker side of herself. She also experiences sexual attraction and begins rebelling as a way to symbolically break with her parent’s idealized version of her.