As she did in her bestselling In Five Years, Rebecca Serle introduces a shot of magic into One Italian Summer.
When Carol Almea Silver dies, her daughter, Katy, wonders: "If your mother is the love of your life, what does that make your husband?" This tectonic shift prompts Katy to take the trip to Positano that she and her mother had planned for Carol's 60th birthday--alone. She leaves her husband, Eric, with a question looming of whether or not she will return. Serle entwines the idea of grief and memory in the wake of loss and solidifies it in the form of Carol at age 30. Together they explore the beauty of Positano as peers. By introducing this thread of magical realism, Serle injects into her novel uncanny truths that only Katy can face about herself.
She gets to ask her mother the questions she thought she'd never get to ask, but she also sees Carol in the light Eric did, and the ways in which Katy may have ceded decisions to her mother that were hers alone to answer.