My rating: ⭐⭐
From the cover:
"“I made the wrong choice.”
Lina is spending the summer in Tuscany, but she isn’t in the mood for Italy’s famous sunshine and fairy-tale landscape. She’s only there because it was her mother’s dying wish that she get to know her father. But what kind of father isn’t around for sixteen years? All Lina wants to do is get back home.
But then she is given a journal that her mom had kept when she lived in Italy. Suddenly Lina’s uncovering a magical world of secret romances, art, and hidden bakeries. A world that inspires Lina, along with the ever-so-charming Ren, to follow in her mother’s footsteps and unearth a secret that has been kept for far too long. It’s a secret that will change everything she knew about her mother, her father—and even herself.
People come to Italy for love and gelato, someone tells her, but sometimes they discover much more."
I waited a long time for this book, and I really wanted to love it. I mean, teenage girl loses her mother to cancer and goes to Italy to spend the summer with the father she never knew existed...yes, please!
As it turns out, this was more of a "meh.Take it or leave it."
I get that Lina was grieving, but she wasn't very likable. She was pretty selfish, kind of bratty, and made some questionable decisions. Not my favorite protagonist. She was shitty to a lot of people, most notably Howard and the poor, forgettable British dude she liked because he was hot and then suddenly didn't like but still led on, until he conveniently ended up being a total dick after seeming perfectly fine for 95% of the book. While we're on the topic of things suddenly changing very suddenly...
Someone please do Jenna Evans Welch a favor and teach her how to use the thesaurus feature in her word processor. Things happened "suddenly" so many times that it started to give me a twitch. There were occasions where something suddenly happened and then suddenly something else happened in back to back sentences. There are so many words! Pick a different word! Also, while I can appreciate that she was trying to be creative, soooooooooo many weird metaphors. I'm all for clever descriptions, but when your descriptive comparisons start to pull the reader out of the story, that's not great.
Finally, let's talk about Mimi and Ren. So many questions. Did he just like her because she was hot? If so, gross. That doesn't endear him to me. Was she nice to other people, or did she treat everyone the way she treated Lina? Why is it that in love triangle situations the non-protagonist in the triangle is always a douchebag? Sometimes people aren't right for each other. What's wrong with showing that in literature? Why does the reason for main character 1 choosing main character 2 always have to be "well, their other option was a total jerk, so..." Guh. Maybe if books did a better job of showing that sometimes you try to date someone and the two of you simply don't jive real people would be better at navigating relationships.
Anyway...yeah. Not my favorite read. It could have been worse, but it also could have been way better.
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