Rebecca Serle writes almost hard and clear about what hurts. Something in her writing felt a bit distant to me when talking about very intimate emotions, but overall the writing of the novel did not take away from the reading experience, and in fact, felt relatively focused and pointed. I do wish Serle had pushed the writing a bit further, doing a bit more showing rather than telling at the heart of the hardest moments.

Alright, so at certain intervals all the characters feel real. At other times, they didn’t quite fit. Both Katy’s mom and Katy felt real for the most part. However, the hotel’s staff very much slipped into the novel to be very convenient plot devices. In a similar vein, Katy herself – while a well-developed character – read as extremely juvenile at times. Her obsession with keeping her mom to herself was odd, and her anger at finding out her mother left her as a child (which results in her sleeping with someone who is not her husband almost out of revenge), felt very petulant and small. I understand everyone processes grief differently, but I had a hard time buying into a 30-year-old woman thinking about her mother as “hers” in a very toddler-like way.

The overarching plot felt interesting, but the details really didn’t feel right. I understand, on a deep level, needing to run away in order to heal from loss and manage grief. However, the way the character then acted as she ran into her mother and started to fall for a stranger in her hotel felt a bit disjointed. In regards to the magical realism, it's also implied that she really did travel back in time, which means she cheated on her husband and decided to never reveal that to him, which, all in all, felt very immature and shitty. Another hold-up I had was the sheer number of details that were so unnecessary. It felt a bit travel journal-ly in the way that Serle chose to recount nearly every meal our MC ate. While I appreciate that as an appeal to travelling to Italy, it felt incongruent with the purpose and theme of the novel.

Death of parent, grief, death, abandonment, infidelity, sexual content, gaslighting, medical content, terminal illness, chronic illness, cancer

Oh. I guess?