Love & Gelato

I thoroughly enjoyed the story of Lina and Ren, as well as her mother’s story. This book kept my interest.

Read this for my bookclub, #readingcupcakes, check it out on IG/Twitter! After all the thrillers and suspenseful books we’ve been reading lately, I’ve really just been dying to read a fun book that would hold my attention and be lighthearted and fun. Love & Gelato totally fit the bill, although it did have a bit of a sad story underneath it all, but that made it all the more interesting in my view. Most of my reviews I don’t include spoilers, but I can’t hold back on this one – so if you haven’t finished the book yet :::STOP HERE::: and don’t read the rest of my post until you are done! 🙂The book is about Carolina “Lina” a girl in high school who loses her mother way too soon to cancer and is shipped off to live with someone who she told is her dad (who she has never met) in Italy. Lina is thrown off as soon as she gets to Italy when she discovers that her father’s house is actually located on a cemetery, an old World War II Memorial site. Soon after she gets there she receives an old journal of her mom and starts learning more secrets about her than she ever expected to.She starts off on a journey around Italy discovering places that her mom wrote about, trying to figure out the secrets of her mother’s past and why she would’ve left her this journal. She meets a bunch of new friends along the way and even falls in love – and not just with gelato. Lina is typical teenager, somewhat selfish and reserved, who at first falls for the hottest guy in the room, yet ends up falling in love with her ‘best friend’, the boy she met by chance the day after she moved to Italy. The love story part was a bit cliche, but I am a sap and got sucked into it, I wanted it to be a happy ending and for a while I didn’t think that was going to happen, but – deep breath – it did, and they ended up together in the end.As for the part about her mother, that was like a little mystery in enough itself. To discover that the man she went to live with wasn’t actually her father, but instead one of her mom’s closest friends that she thought she could trust her daughter to, that part of the story was really interesting.What I also thought was unique about the book was that it really went into the culture and history of Italy, where Lina was following in her mother’s footsteps and just learning about places I would’ve never known about otherwise. I found myself googling some of the spots that she visited just to see what they looked like for myself.Anyways – I will stop there.

Pretty good

This was such a sweet, fun book and I could have ten books following Lina and her time in Italy and still want more! I had such a good time reading this book and it got me excited about contemporaries again. It was really the best kind of contemporary to read near the end of Summer.In Love & Gelato we follow Lina after her mother has passed away and she is sent to Italy for the Summer to live with the father she didn't know she had. While in Italy, Lina is given a journal from the year her mother got pregnant with her and begins to uncover all of the mysteries her mother left behind.I think one of my favorite aspects of this book was how light it went on the romance. I had expected this book to be pretty romance-heavy, which is fine with these kind of books, but I was genuinely surprised to find that the romance was more of a subplot rather than a dominant narrative. It was really nice that we got to focus more on Lina learning more about her mother and forming a bond with the father she didn't know she had.With that being said, the romance was really sweet and fluffy and didn't feel forced at all. I really loved her romantic interest, though I did feel like the love triangle thing was a little unnecessary. It didn't hinder my enjoyment, but it also could have easily been written out. However, I do see how it is supposed to mirror her mother's love triangle struggles. I feel like maybe if the love triangle had been stronger, then it might have worked better. This sort of love triangle just didn't cut it.I also really loved how much like Mamma Mia it was. I'm not sure if that was intentional on the author's part, but I just kept being reminded of Mamma Mia. Lina's reading her mother's journal to find out things about her, she's in a foreign country, she isn't totally sure who her dad is... A lot of the same elements seem to be there which is nice for someone suffering from a Mamma Mia hangover! I've been wanting to find more books with that same feel, and I'm glad that Love & Gelato is fairly similar.Getting to know more about Lina's mother and her time in Italy was so great and could have easily been its own book! I also really liked how we got a lot of Lina's mother's journal entries to read. It really felt like we were right there with Lina finding out more about her mother. It was also cool to get to see some of Florence's history and have a little bit of Latin thrown in there!Overall this is just a really fun contemporary to read and I felt like I was breezing through it. I would imagine that just about anyone would enjoy this book and not find too much wrong with it. It's not the strongest contemporary out there, but it was so enjoyable and it was so fluffy that I have to give credit where credit is due. If you're looking for something light to read, then this book is the right one for you!