🌟🌟🌟🌟 1/2
Any book that starts with a Lorelai Gilmore quote is destined to be a book that this reader will love. And so it was!
Katy Silver, our first person POV narrator, is a thirty year-old freelance copywriter, married to Eric, a dorkily handsome Disney film executive, living in Culver City, California.
Their life together, before this narrative begins, is something of an enigma. Which is telling, as Katy’s story, as it begins, is not about her love and life with Eric at all.
For Katy is in love with her mother, Carol. Not romantically (of course) but with the dreamy somewhat adolescent love that comes with worshipping a beautiful, confident woman (remember this is Katy’s story) who always knows what to do and say, and is the perfect guide to answer any question, frame any decision, that life may pose. Including (perhaps especially?) those concerning Katy.
Until the day Carol succumbs to a terrible illness.
“I cannot yet conceive of a world without her, what that will look like, who I am in her absence.”
As the bottom, the center, the entire essence of her world collapses into fragments around her, Katy finds questions, and more questions, crowding her mind, including inevitably. – How do I go on, without her? And, do I have a marriage that can sustain me?
“There was no relationship above ours. I was her one, just like she was mine.”
Her emotional cliff crumbling, Katy embarks on a trip to Positano – a beautiful and memorable area of Italy that figured large and integral in her mothers life. Her grief her only beacon, Katy’s need to reconnect with her mother’s early life, is primal, a puppy drawn to a fading beam of sunlight, any warmth at all her salvage.
Poignant and evocative, Katy’s story, as it unfolds, is beautifully rich, both with the splendor of her surroundings, and the immediacy of her anguish.
How do our long-lived narratives, held unquestioned, influence our reality?
Who do we, ultimately, belong to?
And can one summer, lived with abandon in the timeless beauty of Positano, Italy, – where past and present mysteriously merge – help Katy uncover her release?
A great big thank you to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.
