A review by strawb3rrysugar
One Italian Summer by Rebecca Serle

emotional reflective relaxing slow-paced

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

3.0

If you like a comfy summer beach read that details delicious meals in a beautiful location, and you can get past the kind of monotonous character work and the main character's immaturity that borders on astounding at points, you'll like this book. The rush job the ending does plummeted this book from 4 stars to three for me. And if you're hoping for an explanation of how the book's time-travel mechanic works, you won't get one, unless Grief Vibes count.

I understand why the MC is the way she is, to an extent (though it borders on emotional incest very often) - she's intentionally built up an image of her mother in her head and has a hard time looking at the world without Mom-tinted glasses. But her exploration of this dynamic and the characters' development is incredibly surface level, and it feels like you're admiring a Pinterest board more than a person who haunts the narrative. Not an atrocious read, just kind of meh. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death and Death of parent

Moderate: Infidelity and Sexual content

Minor: Abandonment

There's two pretty brief sex scenes near the end of the book - descriptive, but not graphic. The central plot of the story has to do with the death of Katy's mother. A large subplot has to do with an affair Katy has with a man named Adam, but it's explained away by this weird time-travel mechanic.

Katy finds out that her mother left her and her father when she was a baby, and gets pretty upset about it.