Love & Gelato ~ Jenna Evans Welch

Genre: Young Adult/Contemporary

Publisher: Simon Pulse

ISBN: 9781481432559

400 pages

Source: Barnes and Noble

I don’t often have the experience of completely losing myself in contemporary stories. That privilege is usually reserved for fantasy and sci-fi. Something about world building and magic and escape, I’m sure.

With that said, Jenna Evans Welch’ s Love & Gelato has changed that game. The bulk of the story takes place in one summer spent in Florence, through the eyes of high school studnet, Lina. She is making good on a promise she made to her mom (who recently passed due to pancreatic cancer) to visit her mom’s old friend and Lina’s biological dad who she has never met until stepping foot on Italian soil.

Though that set up seems significantly charged for emotion and drama as it is, Lina finds herself thrust a little deeper into the past when an old friend of her mom gives her a journal that her mom kept during her own time in the city.

Suddenly, everything Lina thought she knew turns inside out, bringing mystery, magic, and tears right along with her mother’s journal entries.

The story is so well done that I definitly found myself drifting off to the gorgeous Tuscan countryside, wrapped up in artists, green hills, vineyards, and galleries. The setting itself is magical but the humans involved in both the present and past timelines are so three dimensional and substantial that I kept having to remind myself it was fiction.

The cover doesn’t do the actual story justice as it looks like a fluffy little romance. It is truly deep in a soul-bearing way and filled with questions of identity, loyalty, and life purpose.

It’s the perfect summer read in that it is adorable but it also has an incredible amount of real emotion worked in.

I am off to find Welch’s second book, a spin-off about Ireland, which I’ve heard is also excellent. I highly recommend Love & Gelato if you haven’t already found yourself lost in its pages.