Lina is especially impulsive with her decisions and rash about her people judgements, while her new friends are also very straightforward about their feelings. “ like an exclamation mark in human form.”Ĭharacters: the characters in L&G are very believable early teenagers. People come to Italy for love and gelato, someone tells her, but sometimes they discover much more. It’s a secret that will change everything she knew about her mother, her father-and even herself. A world that inspires Lina, along with the ever-so-charming Ren, to follow in her mother’s footsteps and unearth a secret that has been kept for far too long. Suddenly Lina’s uncovering a magical world of secret romances, art, and hidden bakeries. But what kind of father isn’t around for sixteen years? All Lina wants to do is get back home.īut then she is given a journal that her mom had kept when she lived in Italy. She’s only there because it was her mother’s dying wish that she get to know her father. And who exactly is Lina? The girl who is afraid of heights, crowds, high heels, motorcycles, and planes, or the one who storms into a crowded restaurant in her pajamas and boldly reads the riot act to a two-timing boy she's only just met? The surrounding cast give it all they've got, but the reported charm of the YA novel's main character is nowhere to be found here.“I made the wrong choice.” Lina is spending the summer in Tuscany, but she isn’t in the mood for Italy’s famous sunshine and fairy-tale landscape. Perhaps it isn't absurd that an 18-year-old woman would need lessons to walk in high-heeled shoes, but Skaggs simply isn't equipped with the comic timing to make the clumsiness amusing or real. 'Everything is better after gelato.' 'I have this weird feeling this might completely change my life.' 'I've never had anyone worth trusting me.' What does that last one even mean? In the guise of wisdom, banal platitudes and worn-out chestnuts are offered by elders, an effervescent best friend, and earnest suitors.

Stunning Italian scenery? Here, too, but rendered a dull series of lifeless familiar postcards: marble statues in wind-blown piazzas, loud scooters dodging angry bad drivers. The cute couple roaming cobbled streets, feeding each other local delicacies from mom-and-pop markets? It's here. Instead, it's a compendium of commonplace. Better movies in this category have provided guides to growing up, but a miscast lead, poor direction, and mediocre writing overshadow any such attempt here.

If the objective of Love & Gelato was to display every romantic coming-of-age movie cliché known to man, it succeeded.

Love and gelato series order