Shelley Lawrence's Reviews > One Italian Summer

I am in the minority, but for the most part, One Italian Summer, by Rebecca Searle, missed the mark for me. I did enjoy the vivid and interesting descriptions of Positano and the surrounding areas. They were so expressively descriptive I felt like I could feel, taste, smell and breathe in the city myself. I also appreciated the premise of the story, just not the path the plot followed.

The behavior and choices the main character, Katy made were unpalatable to me. Her relationship with her mother was obsessive and unhealthy and her view of her life and the world, immature. In the story, Katy not only bailed on her relationship with her husband, but she also blamed her mother for choices in her mom’s earlier life when they were really not hers to question. After idolizing her, she then accused her mother of not teaching her how to live, being an impossible role model to follow, which is fair, but Katy also never took responsibility for her part, or ownership for her behavior as adults are expected to do.

I did not fully grasp the magical realism element; never found any type of explanation of how such an event occurred. I’m still unclear if one event and timeline impacted the other. Towards the end I accepted it for what it was intended to be, and it was indeed an interesting tool, but it could have been so much more powerful and effective if there had been some attempt to explain the phenomenon.

I did appreciate the conclusion and the way things wrapped up. In fact, that really saved the story for me, and I’m glad that I read it. I just struggled with several elements along the way that made the story less appealing and moving that I’d hoped.