Reviews with content warning for Terminal illness - One Italian Summer

Reviews tagging 'Terminal illness'

One Italian Summer by Rebecca Serle

43 reviews

_verena_'s review against another edition

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emotional sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

1.5

I've never smoked, but it's the last day of my mothers shiva, so here we are...

- One Italian Summer, 00:00:01

🎧 listened to the audiobook

Short Review:
This was such a mess!
It's just too much!
Too overloaded!

More detailed Review:
I really, really, really, REALLY wanted to like this.
And I did! Right until Katy met Carol in Italy and everything went down the drain. But let's start from the beginning.

I was SO glad about Lauren Graham narrating this. Why you might ask? - Just because, obviously, she is Lauren Graham!
Plus: this book is giving major Gilmore Girls vibes from the start, with a quote from Lorelai in the epigraph and then mentioning Gilmore Girls right at the beginning.

However it is a devastating, heart shattering version of it, and I could hardly deal 😭😭😭
Didn't expect this book to be so sad, but at least it helped me realize that my heart is not made of stone and I can still be touched by books (which I suspected I couldn't be after dnfing The Pairing).
However, I was curious about the 'fantasy' part, which didn't sound especially appealing to me, but I liked the overall premise of a woman grieving and her life totally being derailed by the loss of her parent. So it might make some sense, to throw some delusion in there. I think loss and grief are some of the more taboo topics in mainstream literature, which was why I was happy to find it in a book, that seemed to be lightening up the whole thing with its location being Amalfi Coast.

BUT!
There were just tooooooooo many things cramped in there.
Why did there have to be so many additional storylines, which were so poorly executed?
Like:
The whole storyline about the hotel. Nobody cares!

Katy just arrived 1 day ago, and suddenly she is somehow all informed about all of this, because the staff tells her all the details? It's like the whole town knows about the offer for the hotel. I mean, if my mother just had died, I wouldn't care one second about a random hotel being sold, it makes no sense at all!

Katy.
I did like her at the beginning. I liked how lovingly she thought about her mother, her family, how terrible the loss is. But at some point this just got old. We are in her thoughts all the time and of course, when grieving a human does repeat things a lot, to get over it, but still, I feel like Katy didn't get important parts, that were happening around her quite right. If she had though, I think that could have opened up a lot more of interesting thoughts. Example:

When Carol explains to her, that she left her as a baby, because everything was too much, that could have opened up a whole thoughtprovoking sphere about how women are left alone with childcare, housework, mental load etc. Instead this just didn't happen, and Katy just accepted this superficial explanation...

Adam.
Everything about Adam!

Besides being totally uninteresting and having no charm at all, or anything appealing whatsoever, he was just a huge prick. He knows how awful Katy is doing mentally, and yes, he tells her "we don't have to do this blabla", but if he was actually a good guy, he would back off. I mean what kind of person wants to start a 'relationship' (I don't think you could even call it that) with somebody that is not well so QUICKLY - Give that woman time! Unless of course they only want to get in their pants, so here we are, with a MMC that is displaying borderline predatory behavior by telling a women "we don't have to", who is barely keeping it together and therefore not really able to consent in the first place...

Katy + Adam.

In light of what I wrote above, this seems to be a tiny issue, but let's do it: I'm not sure, if she cheated on Eric, I'm leaning towards NO. Technically they are still married. They are however separated. She left him and told him, she is not sure if she wants to be with him anymore.
Plus, she cheated on him around 30ish years ago, when she was traveling through time. She didn't know, she was in a different time and she knew she was still married, but separated. (THIS is why this book is such a mess to me btw.) So NO.
I really have no idea, why people write enraged reviews on her, because this book is "cheating apologetic" or something? These people are separated.
The more interesting question to me is, if she ever told him about any of this (the time traveling and the cheating).

Eric.
#justiceforEric.

In my opinion he was painted so much as a 'bad guy', which he clearly isn't. Let's not forget, that he is grieving too! And I do understand, that after a traumatic event like that, Katy is questioning her life decisions, which include being with Eric, but that doesn't mean he a the villain...

the fantasy element.

aka Katy has somehow fallen through time and everybody who she dealt with actually lived in the past. I'm generally always sceptical, when it comes to time traveling, because most of the time it's badly executed (except maybe in One Last Stop).
Here is extraordinarily bad... She asks what year it is, and that's it.
How did she never notice, that people don't have any smartphones, only old cars are on the street, or any other technical inventions that have happened in the last 30 years? Did she simply not notice? Or worse, think, that this is Italy nowadays? If it's that, she really is the prototype of ignorant-classist-American-traveling-the-world.
Also she tells everybody to invest into Apple and Starbucks... omfg, this is just so stupid!

Conclusion:
Started out strong, became decreasingly weak to end in a complete and annoying mess...

As they say: Sometimes less is more.

Content Warnings

lauren_shilling's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

This book was such an amazing read! I read it leading up to and during my trip to Italy this summer, and I was reading during my brief visit to the Amalfi Coast, and this book captured the energy I got there perfectly! It was the perfect book to compliment the first part of my trip. I'm so happy I finally read this book, and I'm both very upset and very happy that I didn't read it sooner. I loved following Katy and watching how she navigates the grief of losing her mother, while also coming to some very important realizations about herself, her mother, and their relationship. It was a beautiful story set in a beautiful place. The writing in this book felt like the magic of the story, if that makes sense, and it made for a great experience. This book is quite the emotional read as well, as it does follow a main character who has just lost her mother, who she considered her best friend. As wonderful as it was to watch her navigate that, it was also very emotional to read as well.

Content Warnings

kyrstin_p1989's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful reflective sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

I thought this was well—written and interesting. I love the time-travel element in her books that isn’t super science-fictiony. I couldn’t connect with the characters as much as I would’ve liked, primarily I think because this is a story about a woman who has such a deep, abiding love for and affectionate relationship with her mother. As someone who has a difficult mother/daughter relationship I couldn’t imagine what this would be like — it almost seemed like fantasy. I did enjoy the setting of the novel and how the imagery brings to life Positano for the reader. I also liked that there were some parts that were real (the hotel and the people who work there). It is the type of book you don’t want to put down, however, which I love.

Content Warnings

theonlybaillie's review

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emotional reflective relaxing sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No

2.75

There were so many parts of this book that I loved and so many that I really did not like. I loved the setting and descriptions of food/vibes. I enjoyed how the author wrote about emotions. I didn't enjoy the characters, unfortunately. I just found myself being incredibly annoyed by our MC and the lack of consequences for the things that she does in this book.

Spoiler opinions:

I hate a cheating trope. And I hate that there were no consequences for doing that. Her husband did not deserve that. He was nothing but supportive during her grieving, and he gave her the space she needed. He 100% deserves to know the truth. But it conveniently happened during the *magic period* so it apparently doesn't count to our MC. Okay.

So we will do an average of 3 stars.

Content Warnings

khymihr's review against another edition

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reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

jhansell's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

Content Warnings

mattiedancer's review against another edition

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hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Writing: 3.75⭐️/5

Rebecca Serle writes almost hard and clear about what hurts. Something in her writing felt a bit distant to me when talking about very intimate emotions, but overall the writing of the novel did not take away from the reading experience, and in fact, felt relatively focused and pointed. I do wish Serle had pushed the writing a bit further, doing a bit more showing rather than telling at the heart of the hardest moments.

Characters: 3⭐️/5

Alright, so at certain intervals all the characters feel real. At other times, they didn’t quite fit. Both Katy’s mom and Katy felt real for the most part. However, the hotel’s staff very much slipped into the novel to be very convenient plot devices. In a similar vein, Katy herself – while a well-developed character – read as extremely juvenile at times. Her obsession with keeping her mom to herself was odd, and her anger at finding out her mother left her as a child (which results in her sleeping with someone who is not her husband almost out of revenge), felt very petulant and small. I understand everyone processes grief differently, but I had a hard time buying into a 30-year-old woman thinking about her mother as “hers” in a very toddler-like way.

Plot: 3⭐️/5

The overarching plot felt interesting, but the details really didn’t feel right. I understand, on a deep level, needing to run away in order to heal from loss and manage grief. However, the way the character then acted as she ran into her mother and started to fall for a stranger in her hotel felt a bit disjointed. In regards to the magical realism, it's also implied that she really did travel back in time, which means she cheated on her husband and decided to never reveal that to him, which, all in all, felt very immature and shitty. Another hold-up I had was the sheer number of details that were so unnecessary. It felt a bit travel journal-ly in the way that Serle chose to recount nearly every meal our MC ate. While I appreciate that as an appeal to travelling to Italy, it felt incongruent with the purpose and theme of the novel.

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