Love & Gelato (Love & Gelato, #1)

by Jenna Evans Welch

[Joséphine]

Initial thoughts: Set in Italy, where Lina learnt about her late mother's past, Love & Gelato had much to offer. Naturally, I enjoyed the setting. It was also pretty interesting to follow Lina's journey as she discovered more about her own father, whom she hadn't known her entire life. The romance was fairly slow burn, allowing time for the characters to get to know each other. It was quite a contrast to Lina's mother's year spent in Florence prior to Lina's birth. I liked that Lina was given the opportunity to explore that through her mother's journals.

On the audiobook front, I wasn't too thrilled by the mispronounced Italian words. The narrator could technically pronounce the words, including the rolling "r"s and also managed to convey the intonations convincingly. That's why it baffled me when"stracciatella" was pronounced as stra-kia-tella. That would've only been correct if the Italian spelling of the word had been "stracchiatella", which of course, it isn't. I'm not sure, though, which other words were mispronounced because I don't actually speak Italian. I did, however, spend three weeks in Rome, so I made sure to learn how to pronounce the food on an Italian menu.