One Italian Summer

I came to this one because In Five Years had left me annoyed in a useful way. I had argued with friends about whether that ending was fair, and when I saw the same author had a 2022 novel from Atria Books, 272 pages, about a daughter and her dead mother in Positano, I bought it for a train ride and finished it over two evenings with salt on my fingers from snacks. I expected something light about Italy. What I got was sadder and stranger, a grief story wearing a travel dress, with a time slip tucked inside that the book never really explains.

Katy Silver is thirty and stuck in the months after her mother dies. Carol Silver has died of cancer, and Katy has organized her days around that loss. She works in New York, married to Eric, living in an apartment that feels too quiet. Her mother was not only a parent but her closest friend and daily call, the person who helped pick clothes and talked through work problems and knew how Katy takes her coffee. Since the funeral, Katy has been flat. She cries in odd places. She forgets to answer texts. She and Eric orbit each other without meeting. They had planned a trip to Positano with Carol, mother and daughter, a long dreamed visit to the place Carol loved as a young woman. After the death, Katy almost cancels. Eric tells her to go anyway. He does not go with her at first. She boards the plane alone with her mother's old itinerary and a suitcase that feels too heavy.

Losing Carol

The early chapters stay close to Katy and Carol before the trip. Carol ran a small life in a big way, warm and social, the kind of mother who remembers neighbors and sends cards and keeps a clean kitchen. Katy describes summers and phone calls and the slow months of illness, hospital chairs and soup gone cold and friends bringing food. Carol's death is recent when the book opens. Katy has taken leave or cut hours. She describes grief as physical, a pressure in the chest when she reaches for the phone to call a person who cannot pick up.

Eric is present but far away. He is a good man on paper, steady and employed, but the book keeps him at arm's length. He works late. He says the right lines about giving Katy space. They have no big fight. They have the worse thing, politeness covering distance. Katy feels guilty for needing her mother more than her husband and also resentful that Eric cannot fill that gap. She admits she married young and let Carol remain her main guide for choices about work and home. Now that guide is gone.

The decision to keep the Positano booking comes after a push from Eric and from a friend. Katy tells herself she will go for a week, walk where her mother walked, eat where her mother ate, then come home and figure out the marriage. She packs Carol's straw hat and a photo. She prints emails her mother sent about the Amalfi Coast, lemon groves and stairs down to the sea. The plane section is short and tired, the way real travel after loss feels.

Positano alone

Positano in this book is bright to the point of ache. Serle piles on lemons and salt air and cups of coffee that cost more than they should. Katy stays in a small hotel with a balcony over the water. She walks the steep lanes, gets lost, buys peaches she does not finish. She visits the beach her mother described and feels angry that it is beautiful without Carol there. She eats spaghetti with tomatoes and writes nothing in the notebook she brought.

I found these chapters both pleasant and a little long. The food writing is specific, grilled fish and olive oil and bitter greens, shop owners who remember Carol from years ago, a waiter who tells Katy she has her mother's smile. Katy asks questions about where Carol went at her age and gets vague fond answers. She feels like a tourist in her mother's past. She calls Eric once and the call drops into small talk about bills and a leak under the sink. He asks if she is eating. She says yes. Neither says what they mean.

Then the slip happens without fuss. Katy sees a young woman on a terrace who looks like Carol in old photos, same laugh and same way of holding a glass. At first she thinks grief is playing tricks. She follows at a distance, tells herself to stop, then hears the woman called Carol. The woman is about thirty, American, traveling with friends, loud and free and nothing like the careful older mother Katy nursed through illness. Katy does the math and feels sick. This is Carol before marriage, before Katy, before the life Katy knew. The book does not offer a device or a rule. One day Katy wakes and the town holds both times at once, and young Carol is simply there.

Carol at thirty

Young Carol is the best part of the book. She is not a saint. She drinks too much at dinner and flirts and sleeps late. She travels with a friend and talks about staying longer in Italy even though money is tight. She has strong views about art and clothes. She tells Katy, who gives a false name at first, that she is thinking about what to do next, maybe gallery work back home, maybe something with design. She is funny about American tourists and tender about her own mother.

Katy falls into her company almost by accident. They share a table when a restaurant is full. They meet again at a shop. Carol invites this quiet stranger to a party in a rented villa above the sea. Katy says yes before she has time to be sensible. She tells herself she is only watching, only listening, only keeping near the mother she lost. She does not tell Carol who she is. How could she. She says she is also visiting alone and also lost someone. That much is true.

Adam enters here. He is staying in Positano for the summer, connected to the villa crowd, easy with boats and kitchens and introductions. He is in his early thirties, kind to Carol in a way that makes Katy stare. He remembers how she takes her drink. He teases her about her plans and supports her when she talks about work she wants. Katy watches them and feels jealous and protective in shifts. She knows, or thinks she knows, that Carol will later marry Katy's father, a man Carol loves in a quieter way. Seeing Carol light up around Adam scrambles that story.

Learning a mother as a woman

The middle of the book is mostly talk. Katy and young Carol walk and shop and sit on walls looking at the sea. Carol speaks about her parents and about wanting a life that feels chosen rather than handed over. She speaks about fear of settling too soon and about wanting to make things, rooms or shows or images, rather than only keeping a home. Katy listens and keeps comparing this version with the mother who raised her, who kept a tidy house and volunteered at school and gave steady advice about marriage. Both versions feel true. That is the point Serle presses.

Katy starts to tell small truths. She says her mother died recently. She says they were close, too close maybe, and that she does not know who she is without that bond. Young Carol, who does not know she is speaking about herself, gives blunt comfort. She says daughters have to separate. She says mothers are people before they are mothers. She says Katy should ask what she wants from work and from her husband when no one else is grading her. Katy cries in front of her and hates it and feels better after.

The marriage mirror runs under all this. Katy thinks about Eric back in New York, his calm and his absence, the way they stopped touching except by habit. She thinks about how Carol shaped that marriage, approving Eric, smoothing fights, hosting dinners that made Katy and Eric feel like a team. Without Carol, Katy and Eric have no host. She wonders if she married a man who liked the family around her more than her alone. She also wonders if she has been unfair, asking Eric to compete with a memory. Phone calls with Eric stay short. He asks about the hotel. She sends photos of lemons. Neither mentions how long they can keep living like roommates.

Small scenes carry the weight rather than speeches. Carol trying on a dress and asking Katy for an honest view. Katy helping Adam cook pasta while Carol showers and feeling like an intruder. A boat afternoon where Carol swims out too far and Katy panics in a way that gives too much away.

The break and the way back

The break between them builds from care, not cruelty. Katy starts to steer. She warns Carol about settling, about giving up gallery hopes for a safe marriage, about losing herself in a daughter later. She means it as love. Carol hears control from a stranger and pulls back. They fight on a stairway above the shops, voices low because tourists pass with gelato. Carol says Katy does not know her and should not pretend. Katy says she knows more than Carol thinks and cannot say it. Adam tries to calm both and only makes Katy feel more outside.

After the fight, Katy is sick with guilt. She stays in her room and replays hospital months, the way she spoke for Carol when Carol was too tired, the way she may have pressed her mother toward comfort rather than truth at the end. She thinks about Eric and calls him and finally says plain things, that she is lost and angry and that going to Italy has not fixed it. Eric listens and says he will fly over if she wants. She says not yet. She needs a day to make amends in the past she has been given.

The repair with Carol is quiet. Katy apologizes without explaining the impossible. She says she lost her mother and sees something of her in Carol, which is true in a way that still hides the full truth. Carol softens. They share a last meal, anchovies and bread and lemon cake, and Carol speaks more plainly about her plans. She will go home. She will try for work that uses her eye. Katy wants to tell her everything, names and dates and the daughter waiting thirty years ahead, but stops. The book lets the time element stay soft. Katy simply wakes one morning and young Carol is gone from the town in that form, and Katy is left with a hat and a receipt and a clearer head.

The return home takes few pages but matters. Katy flies back with less dread. She and Eric talk in the kitchen without Carol to host them, awkward and honest. She does not promise a perfect marriage. She asks to start again with fewer calls to her mother in her head. She looks at job options with fresh eyes and thinks about what she wants to make rather than only maintain.

What works and what wears thin

The emotional core landed for me. Serle writes daughters and mothers with ease, the daily calls and fierce loyalty that can crowd out a spouse. Katy learning that Carol had wishes apart from motherhood feels earned because we spend hours with young Carol being funny and rash and ambitious about art and a life she has not yet chosen. The scenes with Adam help, since he shows what Carol valued at thirty, play and talk about work, rather than only telling it. When Katy stops trying to edit her mother's past and starts listening, the grief shifts from panic to something she can carry.

The time trick is the weak joint, and the book knows it. There is no rule for why Katy meets Carol at thirty in Positano, why only there, why now, why no one else notices. If you need cause and effect, this will bother you through the second half. I set it aside as a device for conversation, a wish granted so a daughter can meet her mother as a peer, but readers who liked tight plotting may feel cheated. The prose does not even try to justify it with family lore or local myth beyond a line or two about the town holding memory.

Eric stays thin. He exists mostly on the phone, asking about food and flights, then arriving near the end to be kind and hurt. We learn little about his work or friends or why Katy chose him apart from steadiness. That thinness serves the theme, since Katy has to see how much Carol mediated the marriage, but it leaves the final reunion less moving than the scenes between Katy and Carol. A few more pages with Eric as a person rather than a patient voice would have helped.

The travel writing will split readers. I liked the lemons and stairs and sea for a while, then wanted more plot with my lunch. Meals arrive often, with detail about oil and fish and cake, and shopkeepers arrive to praise Carol and feed Katy. If you read for place, this is a treat. If you read for pace, skim a lunch or two and you will miss little.

Still, I closed the book kinder toward it than I expected at the start. It does not claim that a week in Italy cures grief or fixes a marriage. It claims something smaller, that meeting your parent as a young woman with plans for galleries and design and summers that end can loosen the grip of the parent you nursed at the end. For readers who lost a mother recently, that may feel close. For others, it remains a readable story about Katy Silver and Carol and Adam and Eric, set where the light makes sorrow easier to look at, with flaws you can name and a center that holds.