‘Love & Gelato’ is a young adult novel about a woman named Lina, who visits Italy after her mother’s passing. Still dealing with the grief, and debating whether or not to meet her absent father for the first time in over a decade, Lina spends the beginning of her trip very upset. After discovering her mom’s old journal, however, she’s inspired to visit various vibrant places and people in the country. She makes new friends and meets potential lovers. She learns to enjoy her trip and comes away from the experience having grown and learned from it. A great deal of young adult melodrama takes place, none of which is handled in any particularly interesting way. Lina’s friendships feel lackluster and it’s difficult to get attached to those side characters. Perhaps this was done intentionally to depict the difficulty of making adult friendships, especially as someone undergoing the traumas that Lina was, but it simply came off as poor writing in execution. The romance and main love interests’ plotline took away from what made the book interesting and felt like it only artificially affected Lina’s character. However, compared to the bulk of Lina’s isolated presence in the story, it’s immensely more entertaining. Lina’s narration voice is bland and makes nearly no difference to the tone of the novel. Her inner monologue during most of the simple interactions she goes through is essentially useless. It says next to nothing about her character, and doesn’t convey any meaningful ideas. This would be passable if it wasn’t the majority of the novel’s substance. Even still, the emotional journey Lina takes with mourning and striving for closure was a very compelling part of the story and made it worth the read. Lina herself isn’t a very interesting character, but her grief and family life is fascinating.