live life fully

Dear readers, 

Every daughter eventually hits a turning point in her life and finds herself asking the same question: who was my mother before she was “Mom”? The woman with a different last name, an entire separate life, and dreams that had nothing to do with being anyone’s parent?

That question is the engine of Rebecca Serle’s One Italian Summer, our inaugural pick for the Vivace Book Club this July.

In the wreckage of losing her mother to cancer, Katy leaves her husband behind and takes the trip to Positano that she and her mother had always meant to take together. 

Soon after she arrives, the impossible happens: a young version of Carol appears, decades before she became anyone’s mother at all, and Katy gets the strange gift of knowing her as a peer rather than a parent. There is romance too, with a fellow hotel guest named Adam, which keeps the book from ever fully tipping entirely into a grief memoir but adds a touch of “will they or won’t they” suspense as the plot goes on. 

Readers familiar with Serle’s work will recognize her for her touch of the impossible. Her previous novel, In Five Years, gave its protagonist Dannie a single glimpse of her own future, then spent the rest of the book working out what to do with it once the man from that glimpse turned up in real life, dating her best friend. One Italian Summer runs the same trick in reverse. Instead of a glimpse forward, Katy gets her mother’s past.

We selected this specific title for the soft launch because it masterfully delivers on the ultimate promise of a beach read: it whisks you away to sun-drenched and delicious shores, evoking the sensory bliss of coastal restaurants and the dreamy, exclusive allure of beach clubs like La Fontelina, all while charting the complex, deeply human currents of how we choose the lives we live. 

Bonus points for the audiobook, narrated by Lauren Graham, which has turned a generation of Gilmore Girls fans into instant converts. Consider this the Rory Gilmore pick of the summer.

Let’s be honest: this story has its detractors, and we can see why. 

A few early reviewers bristled at Katy calling her mother her ‘one great love,’ reading codependency into what Serle penned as pure devotion (in truth, it’s likely a mix of both). And if we’re being entirely frank, there were chapters where even this editor found Katy hard to root for. 

But grief rarely makes anyone rational, and that feels worth noting rather than considered a flaw in the writing. Grief strips away logic and leaves something rawer in its place, and a protagonist who is messy processing her life’s decisions and that of her mom reads truer than one who handles loss gracefully. 

Beneath its summer romance, the narrative is grounded in the heavier truths of loss and betrayal. It proves that recovery isn’t about outrunning the ghosts of our past, but learning to weave them into the fabric of whatever comes next. 

There is something else worth sitting with here: a deeply humanizing realization that the people who raised us, no matter how much love filled the home, were never the finished, fully knowable adults we assumed them to be

The Magic of Positano

In this book, Positano, Naples, and Capri are far more than mere backdrops for a photo op. They are the crucibles of Katy’s awakening, where she slowly emerges from her grief to let wonder back in, a testament to why so many of us seek our truest selves far from home (color me deeply guilty). 

From the dizzying cliffs and charming hotel staff at the iconic Hotel Poseidon, the setting comes alive so vividly that yes, this editor absolutely paused to look up room rates mid-chapter.

The setting carries its own real history. Serle has spoken about traveling to Italy with her own mother (who is still very much alive) in 2019, where the two of them tracked down a man her mother had loved decades earlier, long before Serle existed. Watching that reunion is what seeded the novel, the realization that our mothers lived whole, complicated lives before we ever arrived, full of ambition and longing they may never have mentioned to us.

Early on, Katy’s mother offers a piece of advice that lingers: she has more time than she thinks, and she needs to live it. For anyone at a crossroads, that line hits home, prompting the ultimate, wistful thought experiment. What would you ask your own mother if you could meet her as a stranger, long before she became the architect of your childhood?

Keen to hear your thoughts, 

Xoxo Georgette