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Jenna Evans Welch: Love and Gelato - Book 1

 This was a book club choice for this month, and I've never read it before. I will say, going into this review, (as I do frequently) that romance is not my genre...

Lina thought she knew her mother. It had always been the two of them, and her mother was a force of nature. Then came the diagnosis, and the details of the man that her mother said was Lina's father. After her mother's passing, Lina agreed to go and stay with her father in Italy, where he lived. Upon arriving, she finds that he lived in a WWII memorial graveyard, and she met Ren, the most gorgeous boy she'd ever seen. Then comes the journal. It's from her mother, and the first words say, "I made the wrong choice." Can Lina uncover the truth about her mother's time in Italy and her own self?

Overall, this book was cute, but predictable. I had most of it figured out before I was very far into the book, and it felt almost like a formulaic YA romance (the first boy is always the boy, no matter who else comes along).

Lina as a character really fell flat to me - I didn't feel like she had any significant growth herself over the course of the book. The change that did happen was incremental, so most of the story focused on her mom. Lina herself falls apart at any mention of death, and whines about how much she hates being there the entire book. While I get that I probably would be no different if I had Lina's lived experience, I don't find it interesting to read. The side characters were fine, but I felt that beyond Ren, Mimi and Thomas, the other side characters were unimportant, easy to mix up, and almost just there.

The plot follows a story within a story kind of format, with Lina's mother. Lina's mother's story is embedded into Lina's, and felt like it was based on the tropes of miscommunication and surprise pregnancy. Lina's own relationship with Ren also feels like that miscommunication trope, and it really bothered me that she wouldn't really tell anyone how she really felt about anything.

I think my biggest issue in the novel was the dialogue. There was so much throw-away dialogue in this novel that was unimportant and nonfunctional. It was boring to read, and felt on-the-nose. Everything was too one-dimensional for me.

I think this is a good candidate for my school library. It is a cute story for a teen romance. It's definitely YA, and there's not a lot of boundary-pushing in the novel.

Overall, I rated this book ⭐⭐⭐



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