Love & Gelato

Sixteen-year-old Lina has just lost her mother after a short illness. Instead of staying in Seattle, she is sent to Tuscany for the summer, to live with Howard, a father she has never met. He looks after a World War II cemetery outside Florence, and Lina plans to leave as soon as she can.

Then Howard gives her her mother's journal, written during a year her mother spent in Florence studying photography. Its entries send Lina to the places her mother loved, and they raise questions about what happened between her parents long ago.

Lina does not search alone. Ren, a neighbor who is half Italian and half American, teases her and takes her around the city. At school she also starts to build a circle of friends, and the idea of going home begins to lose its pull.

Whether the journal gives Lina answers, and whether she wants to leave once it does, drives the story. Grief, family secrets and first love share the pages of this light, summery young adult contemporary romance. It is the first of the author's companion novels, each with a different heroine, so it reads fine on its own.