Days after her mother Carol's death from cancer, Katy Silver boards a plane to Positano, Italy.  The trip that she was supposed to take with Carol, her best friend, is now a trip for one - an opportunity for healing and some introspection, as in the hard weeks leading up to her mother's passing, Katy told her husband she's not sure she can be married to him anymore.  Positano is exactly as Carol described, and Katy is looking forward to reconnecting with the memory of her mother through the places she loved, until she runs into Carol in the hotel lobby, 30 years old, happy and healthy.  A trip that started as an opportunity for mother and daughter to bond that turned into an opportunity to mourn has been turned on its head once again - what Katy learns about her mother reveals a new woman to her.

This is a really sweet book, the kind I can envision being passed between mothers and daughters to think about their own relationships with each other.  Katy is absolutely devastated by Carol's death, reeling from the double loss of her mother and her best friend.  I think this makes her kind of a weak character to some, as she does seem incredibly paralyzed by grief, but to me it seems realistic.  When a parent dies, the child often has to mourn them twice, once for them as a parent and once for them as a human with their own interests and motivations, and that seemed very present.  The character of

Adam irked me, but only because as a voracious romance reader I wasn't interested in any threat to Katy's husband Eric, who had already been set up as a good guy.

Although the prose was occasionally a bit over the top, One Italian Summer was a really nice pretend vacation after a few days of being iced into my apartment in the cold Midwest.  If you're looking to think through some grief, or to escape to the Italian coast, this is a must-read.

Thank you Atria and NetGalley for the ARC!

CWs:

death of a parent from cancer, caretaking for a dying parent, separation from a spouse, infidelity/seeing someone else in a separation