An Italian stunner
Two novels by well-established writers. One leaves you wanting more. The other disappoints
One Italian Summer
By Rebecca Serle Quercus, £14.99
Reviewed by Madeleine Kingsley
IF THERE was ever a time for escapist fiction, it’s surely now. An Italian Summer, by Rebecca Serle, transports us from brutal reality to the Amalfi coast and a restaurant terrace in early evening where “the light is golden and liquid and heavy, like it’s just beginning on its second glass of wine.”
Benvenuto to a love story with a sharp scent of lemons, shimmering with sensuality and surprise. It’s about love, not just in the couple-y sense, but love as friendship, love for place and new experience, love, above all, between a mother and daughter that is heightened and reconfigured after loss.
Serle’s story starts in LA, where Katy’s beloved mother Carol has just died of cancer. A week-long shiva has reinforced her image as a muchmissed paragon, an interior designer and community pillar who could whip up dinner from three items in the pantry and had all the answers to life’s questions, great and small. Katy is not just bereft but totally destabilised, her world spinning off its settled axis with Eric, the husband whom she married probably too young and who now seems a poor substitute for the soulmate mother.
The plan had been for mother and daughter to share a grand Italian trip. At the end of the cancer treatment she would treat Katy to the trip of a lifetime back to Positano where Carol had spent one sparkling summer before settling down. Katy decides to take that trip alone, time out to review the state of her marriage and her future.
Readers of Serle’s novel In Five Years will know that she (a New York Times bestselling author can be playful with her tenses, teasing the reader with a tad of time-travel and strange meetings across the decades. The future depends on how Katy will re-interpret her mother’s given version of the past. Without giving too much away, you could say that Katy’s Italian idyll serves up a myth-busting version of the woman her mother was at 30. She comes to see Carol as an adventurous green-eyed flirt, swimsuited in polka dots, who might responsibly return to the States or, alternatively, stay on to redesign a local hotel interior…
Room service for Katy herself comes in the guise of a romantic rival to ever-steady Eric: he’s Adam “a man who hasn’t seen me wan and laid out with the stomach flu, or folded over on the first day of my period”. Katy, in short, finds herself (with one key maternal difference) at the same crossroads her mother once faced.
RebeccaSerle’s gift is to write lightly about serious issues — family secrets, fidelity, women’s choices — enveloping them in charm and magic realism, a little like ravioli divinely wrapped around ricotta.
Never underestimate the skill that goes into a novel that reads as though effortlessly penned and leaves you wanting more. I came away thinking how true the consolatory, saying, “May her memory be a blessing”, can be of a mother who turns out to be not as perfect as believed — but perfectly imperfect.