Romance with a magical twist, stepping back into the past to push ahead after a devastating loss (Los Angeles and the Amalfi Coast; present and thirty-years earlier): “I do not know who I am anymore,” laments thirty-year-old Katy Silver. “You’re grieving. “You’re in crisis,” her tenderhearted husband Eric replies, adding “people don’t get divorces in the middle of a war.” But what if the “love of your life” dies and she’s your mother? “What does that make your husband?” What it makes for us is another winning Rebecca Serle novel, One Italian Summer.

“One summer is one summer,” but “can it change your life?” What if you’re suffering an unimaginable loss and you flee to the magical Amalfi Coast in Italy, where you find yourself hiking the out-of-this-world, ancient Path to the Gods? And fortunate to be staying at the heavenly Hotel Poseidon, with a terrace overlooking the Mediterranean Sea?

Telling you how these questions are answered would break the no-spoilers-allowed tenet, but if you’ve read one or both of Serle’s knockout 2020 and 2018 novels – In Five Years and The Dinner List – then you know she has a flair for combining grief, loss, romance, and fantasy. If the first time reading Serle’s literary magic, you too will marvel at how she cleverly mixes rock-bottom lows with fabulous highs.

Serle’s trademark, based on her three adult novels, reveals a creative, skillful, and captivating pattern of crafting prose that enchants. Prose with sexy dialogue that gets to the heart of things quickly and sharply.

Serle also knows how to win readers and audiences who like romances. Two of her four YA romance novels she adapted into the Freedom TV series: Famous and Love (2014) and the sequel Truly, Madly, Famously (2015), both hits. Another film, Rosaline, inspired by her YA debut When You Were Mine (2012), is currently being made. That leaves The Edge of Falling (2014), perhaps headed that way too? Her scriptwriting talent shines through her seductive prose.

One Italian Summer, like her two earlier adult novels, uses magical realism – time travel – dreaming up realistic storylines and settings while employing a fantastical element to drive the plot. Set in Los Angeles, where Serle lives like Katy and Eric do. (Her first two novels are set in New York, where the author also divides her time.) In this novel (and The Dinner List) the female protagonist, grief-stricken Katy, steps back into the past. (In Five Years, into the future.) All splendidly demonstrate Serle can juggle heavy-hearted, tearful together with lighter-hearted, feel-good.

The death of Katy’s mom Carol, who taught her everything and was at the center of her life, has already happened when the novel opens. The Silver family and many friends (she was a “pillar in the community”) are mourning her loss after the funeral, called sitting Shiva in the Jewish faith. By now Katy has already told loving, thoughtful Eric she’s not sure she can stay married to him anymore. It’s not just him. She doesn’t know how she can go on. “I cannot yet conceive of a world without her, what that will look like, who I am in her absence,” she tells us on page three.

During this painfully sad and utterly unbalanced time, two tickets arrive in the mail for the trip Katy and her mother were planning to take up until a week before she passed away. Hope can be therapeutic. While it didn’t save Carol, could it rescue Katy, who has fallen apart?

No doubt a setting like Positano in June before crowds of tourists arrive isn’t a place for grieving. Serle knows that but given Katy’s fragile emotional state no matter how beautiful a setting she’s going to need something more to jolt her forward. So, soon after Katy arrives (note: the trip encouraged by sensitive Eric), she spots her mother. Not the Carol she knew, but the Carol Before. Before she became a Mom. This Carol is thirty-years-old, gifting Katy a precious chance to “see what she saw, what she loved before she loved me.” Why “she always wanted to return” to “this magical place that showed up so strongly in her memories.”

Still not enough when Katy’s so vulnerable and emptied out, and the author’s aim is to tempt with the thrill of a new romance. Enter into this otherworldly picture handsome, sexy, single Adam she meets on the morning after her arrival at the absolutely romantic hotel. On that sea view terrace, her appetite comes back after months when she couldn’t eat taking care of her mother on leave from her copyediting job. (Note: Eric also took leave from his film job with Disney to be by her side and the mother-in-law he loved too.) The meals are scrumptious and the delicious wine flows like water.

Under other circumstances, you’d think she’d want Eric to use the second ticket. Already you know that’s not going to happen. He understands he must let her go if she’s going to ever come back to him. Freedom isn’t just the name of Serle’s hit TV series, it’s giving someone you love the freedom to find her way. She won’t be the same. But will she find her way back home to him, or not?

If only Eric wasn’t the only boyfriend she had, she’d know how lucky she is. We really like him but she’s questioning whether they married too soon? Carol thought so, but she also knew he was such an easy-going, warm, and awfully friendly soul. “We made promises in a world lit with light. We do not know what to do in the darkness.” Two great sentences that capture how Katy feels. The thing is Eric doesn’t feel that way at all, and so he wants to help her get through this. “Because I’m your husband,” he says. “That’s what I’m here for. That’s the point.” Katy sadly isn’t able to hear the anguish and love in Eric’s voice.

Adam is wonderfully imagined as the guy to tantalize Katy in the fantasy world she’s run into. He loves Positano as much as her mother did. A perfect guide since he knows all the romantic hideaways to wine and dine including the island of Capri and Naples.

One of the great string of flirty lines between Adam and Katy goes like this:

Adam: “You know what I think your problem is?”

Katy: “What’s my problem?”

Adam: “You don’t feel like you have any agency in your life”

Katy: “You’ve known me for two hours.”

Adam: “We had breakfast, lest you forget. And you were late to dinner. Let’s call it thirteen hours.”

The crisp dialogue about her problem continues with:

Kate: “Is that all?”

Adam: “Yeah, you’re cute.”

Kate: “That’s a problem?”

Adam: “For me? Definitely.”

Carol is very much in this Technicolor picture too, surprising Katy at every turn. She may have abandoned Katy “with no instructions” as to how to live her life without her in it, but she actually provides them in her own youthful way when they magically connect.

Adam’s purpose is deeper than the steamy sexual chemistry. Along with experiencing impulsive, freer Carol, One Italian Summer asks us how we make the most important decisions in our lives. By doing what others expect us to do? Or, what our hearts tell us?

Lorraine