Love & Gelato

Love & Gelato by Jenna Evans Welch is one of those books where you are immediately drawn to the cover and yet hesitant of the story because quite honestly the synopsis sounds so basic and rudimentary that I’d rather get a root canal at the dentist than spend a few hours of my life reading it. Overall, I wouldn’t say it was root canal status, but more like a cavity.

You can ignore the pain for the most part, but as soon as you eat something hot or cold the pain is immense and immediate. Tooth allegories aside, Love & Gelato had both good and bad aspects that turned it into an enjoyable, yet forgettable and problematic read.

So synopsis: teenage girls goes to Italy, falls madly in love, and encapsulates almost all Mary-Sue like qualities except for two things: having curly hair and liking to eat. I’m sorry Ms. Welch but having a main character that enjoys eating gallons of gelato in Italy is not quirky, it’s realistic.

I don’t think I ate anything else while I was in Italy two summers ago. Also, why does curly hair always have to equal crazy in books? Not everyone with curly hair thinks their strands have a mind of their own, some people enjoy, even relish I dare say, having curls. So there’s that.

In addition, the main character’s name is Lina because of course it is. Reading about a character with a normal female name in young adult literature is like winning the lottery-a one-in-one-millionth chance.

While Lina was alright to have as a narrator the other characters seemed to intensely sway into the “saint” or “pure evil” categories. Example one: Howard. Saint-like man that adopts the daughter of the woman he once loved but broke his heart into a million pieces, pays for all of her food and clothing, wants to keep her in his life like a surrogate step-daughter, and doesn’t seem to mind too much that he was gipped out of an entire domestic life with his one true love.

Wow. And then there’s people like Matteo: abusive, arrogant, predatory, delusional, and violent. Okay.

What I mean to get at here is that Love & Gelato borders on the highly unrealistic for several reasons, the large part of which revolve around the characters.

While enjoyable to sometimes read about, the characters were definitely two-dimensional and lacked the proper depth that makes you want to keep reading and devour a book. It felt like Jenna Welch tried really hard to create characters that were awesome, but seemed to fall as flat as Italian pizza apparently is.

Going along with the characters were the dialogue and the inner monologues. Two things nearly made this book unbearable for me: the colloquial lingo and the attempt at relatable humor. There is nothing that teenagers hate more than people trying to assume what they like and how they talk (trust me I would know-I’m a high school teacher).

So when you have a book with a narrator that says “literally” every other page and answers “totally so cool” to something like the sight of the Duomo in Italy-a massive work of architectural genius and artistic design-then yes, I get a bit annoyed.

I know what Ms. Welch is trying to accomplish-relatibility! Comparison! Connection! Instead, it comes across like that try-too-hard uncle that wants to be in on the what the young people are doing and saying but just ends up being pathetic and laughed at. Sorry Jenna.

The last negative I’ll mention is the falling in love aspect of course. It’s ridiculous. Most love stories I can get into, but it was obvious to any person with any remnant of a brain cell that Lina was into Ren and not Thomas.

The fact that it took Lina almost 300 pages to figure out the same thing was annoying and tedious. She is the epitome of the Oblivious Narrator to aggravating extremes.

Take into the account that the whole plot would have collapsed and died if Lina had just read her mom’s journal in one go gives you the same feeling of pointlessness you get when you eat directly after getting your teeth cleaned (every time). Add in the fact that they were saying “I love you” after only FIVE DAYS and you’ll find that you’ll develop a tooth ache as well.

So the negatives summed up: totally two-dimensional characters, so totally collapsible plot, totally annoying thinking, and totally not so cool dialogue that slapped you in the face with its juvenility. I’m sure you can see what other bit was problematic.    

On to the positives! Reading about Italy and all the places Lina traveled was actually very cool. As always, it is much appreciated when an author takes research or their own life experiences and utilizes it in their writing to make it lively and credible.

I liked learning about the different flavors of gelato, tourist attractions, Italian phrases, and the stereotypical aggressively bad taxi drivers.

Second, it was an easy read. Sometimes you don’t want to be analyzing The Scarlet Letter or breaking your brain over something Vonnegut wrote, you just want cheap and easy entertainment: like watching The Bachelor (yes, I watch that show. It makes for an incredible drinking game).

Love & Gelato delivers on that. It’s a simple love story about a girl in Italy and makes you as a reader fall in love with the idea of love and traveling.

Third, I actually liked the reasoning behind Lina going to Italy. Instead of a baffling or arbitrary motive like, “Italy is just so romantic!” she actually had a solid intention based on grief and loss. I can relate to that. It was definitely the most profound aspect of the book.

Lina’s loss and her attempt to grapple with it gave the book a much needed layer that made it emotional as it was heartening. Although I think Jenna Welch could have focused on it more to add a few more layers to her book, it was something I appreciated seeing in YA.

Recommendation: If you feel like going to Italy but can’t afford it, you can live vicariously through this book and experience loss, love, and gelato if you can get around the millions of “totally’s” and “literally’s” that are littered throughout.

  Score: 6/10