Love & Gelato

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2016

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 5

Chapters 6-11

Chapters 12-15

Chapters 16-22

Chapters 23-28

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 12-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 12 Summary

For an American raised on ice cream, gelato is a revelation for Lina: “Take the deliciousness of a regular ice cream cone, times it by a million, then sprinkle it with crushed unicorn horns” (167). When she gets home, she goes to her bedroom (Howard is watching an old James Bond flick) and returns to her mother’s journal.

Her mother recounts her first visit (with X) to one of Florence’s public statues, The Rape of the Sabine Women. X had explained its backstory to her: How Roman soldiers kidnapped the women of a neighboring tribe called the Sabines, and the Sabine men raided Rome to bring back their kidnapped women only to discover, according to X, that the women did not want to leave Rome. “Rape,” he says, was a poor translation of the Italian word for “kidnapping.” In front of the statue, X impulsively tells Hadley that he loves her.

For her part, Hadley records spending most of her time waiting for X, only to be with him in brief snatches of time. She is at his beck and call. She realizes her six months in Italy are nearing their end. As she reads the journal, Lina blames Howard (whom she believes is X) for being so noncommittal to her mother. Within a few weeks, Hadley learns the nursing program back in Seattle has revoked her acceptance. X arranges for the school to offer Hadley a second semester at half-tuition. As Christmas approaches, with X out of town, Hadley, now alone, takes a trip to Paris with Francesca.

Although Hadley falls in love with the picturesque city, she misses X. She feels weird that she cannot share her love story with Francesca. Hadley begins her second semester with an ambitious project to film the working-class world along Florence’s Arno River. During one of the field trips to the docks, one of her project partners, Adrienne, takes her to see a psychic. Hadley is dubious, but she goes along. The psychic tells them they are both in for heartache.

During a walk to an art history lecture in Florence with Howard, Howard shows Hadley a sculpture of a boar’s head, which is easy to miss along one of the walls of the Duomo. The legend is that one of the stonemasons who worked on the cathedral had an affair with the wife of a baker who supplied food for the workers. The baker took them both to court and humiliated the wife publicly. For his revenge, the stonemason carved the bull into the wall overlooking the bakery so that it would stare down on the cuckolded husband forever.

Each journal entry raises more questions in Lina’s mind about Howard and her mother.

Chapter 13 Summary

Howard offers to take Lina back to the Duomo and promises her a beautiful view of the city from atop the cathedral’s fabled staircase. Before they go to the cathedral, however, they stop for gelato. Once again, the sweet taste amazes her, and Howard tells her that her mother loved gelato as well. They pass a fountain, the streams of water coming out of a bronze statue of a boar. Local legend says if a person rubs the boar’s snout, they will return to Florence someday. Lina wonders whether her mother had ever rubbed the statue’s snout. They head to the Duomo and ascend the iconic 400-step stone staircase. Howard is right—the view from the top amazes Lina.

Chapter 14 Summary

Lina realizes she likes Howard. Lina gets ready to go with Ren to Space, the upscale club her mother visited; however, it’s Thomas Heath who is on her mind. “You’d better be there tonight, Thomas Heath” (195), she thinks. But when Ren arrives on his red scooter, he says Space does not open for a few hours. He expresses genuine interest in Hadley’s journal and asks Lina whether he might read a few entries before they go.

Space is throbbing with music and crowded with young people, including Mimi. Lina spots Thomas with his “bone-melting smile” and remembers all over again how attractive he is (208). Thomas escorts her to the club’s spacious dance floor with couples dancing, “like having-sex-on-the dance-floor dancing” (205). Lina gets caught up in the crowd, the music, and Thomas and finds herself dancing, “actually dancing” (206).

During a break, Lina sees Mimi and Ren talking. Thomas brings her a drink. The drink immediately goes to her head, and she struggles to a couch. There she is bothered by a stranger, an older man who smells of vodka. She’s rescued by Mimi, who also warns Lina to leave Ren alone. Mimi says Ren is only looking after her because he feels sorry for her because her mother is dead. Lina believes Mimi and decides it’s time to leave. Before Lina leaves, Ren stops and asks about the creepy old guy, saying, “I shouldn’t have left you alone” (215). Lina asks him directly whether he feels sorry for her. Ren denies it and offers to drive her home.

Chapter 15 Summary

Lina and Ren go to the city first. Lina wants to look at The Rape of the Sabine Woman statue again to study all three of its figures. What a strange place for Howard to have declared his love for her mother, she thinks. Lina assures Ren that if it makes Mimi uncomfortable, she understands his reluctance to hang out with her. Ren tells her that is not the case.

When Lina gets home, she asks Howard about The Rape of the Sabine Woman and watches for his response. Howard doesn’t react. It occurs to Lina that the entry about the statue mentions Howard, so X cannot be Howard. Who then is X? X is her father, not Howard. She wonders if her mother pretended to love Howard just to cover the pregnancy. Lina returns to the journal to pick up her mother’s story.

It is late spring, and Hadley finds out that her scholarship has been extended through the summer. Excited by the news, she decides to surprise X who is in Rome attending an art conference. She picks out a dress—The Dress—and heads to Rome. X, however, stuns her by saying they are finished, that she is stifling his creativity, and that he is resigning his position in Florence and staying in Rome. She feels “shattered in a million pieces” (232).

Lina struggles with the revelation that X, her father, had been a “serious jerk” (234). What, she wonders, “was so special about X anyway?” (235).

Chapters 12-15 Analysis

The Difference Between Love and Passion emerges in these chapters as a central theme in the story and the primary lesson Lina will learn from her mother. Here, Lina begins to see what her mother meant about having made the wrong choice. The night Lina spends amid the drunken couples in Space starts to define for her the delineation between love and passion, specifically between the genuine care and generous emotional support of Ren and the superficial, surface attraction of Thomas Heath.

As she contrasts Ren with Thomas, Lina replays the same dilemma her mother faced between Howard and X. Hadley’s entries record her dilemma caught between X, the mercurial professor, and the kind companionship of Howard. In these chapters, Lina struggles to square her mother’s journal entries about the charismatic X with the quiet, gentle figure of Howard. She reads her mother’s descriptions of how X used her and exploited her attraction to him, painting a cautionary picture of passion that isn’t grounded in love: “Some days we get along, other days he acts like I really am just a friend” (170). Hadley’s experiences begin to put Lina on her guard against Thomas.

Throughout the novel, Welch uses gelato as a symbol of love. Both Ren and Howard take Lina for gelato. In both cases, Lina is stunned by the sweet goodness of the Italian ice cream. It is more than dessert. It is magical and gives Lina a sensory feeling of delight that upends every expectation she ever had of American ice cream. That gelato is associated with both Howard and Ren suggests that they both offer her something of substance—new kinds of relationships—paternal and romantic love, respectively—emotions she has never felt before. Lina admits that her experience of gelato is life-changing. She tells Howard she is so enamored with gelato she will name her first daughter “stracciatella” after her favorite flavor. The novel associates both Howard and Ren with the gelato experience, suggesting that each of them is also a life-changing experience for Lina.

As Lina prepares to make her own choice about The Difference Between Love and Passion, Welch continues to compare Ren and Howard in Lina and Hadley’s respective stories. Lina wants to impress Thomas when she preps for her night at Space. Even though Ren invited her, Lina gets ready hoping that Thomas Heath, whose smile melts her, will notice her. Thomas makes his move on Lina, mocking Ren’s “protective” concern for her (171), a concern that parallels Howard’s worry for Hadley. Ren recognizes what Thomas’s motivations are just as Howard could see X’s mistreatment of Hadley.

Welch also highlights the strength of passion’s pull in both Lina and Hadley’s experiences. Lina cannot control her attraction to Thomas. His smile “obliterate[s] pretty much any control [she] ha[s] over [her] facial muscles” (207). It is never explicitly clear whether Thomas puts something in Lina’s drink, but she immediately feels funny. The encounter with the older lecher gives the evening a Fellini-esque, nightmarish quality. Unlike Lina’s cannonball off the diving board where she feels alive and happy for the first time in a long time, in Space with Thomas, she feels off-balance and out of control with the throbbing beat and the whirling couples on the dance floor. Hadley’s own passion for X gives insight and meaning to Lina’s unfolding narrative as mother and daughter experience the potentials danger of strong passion not grounded in love.

These chapters highlight Lina’s evolving Definition of a Father. In Chapter 15, Lina figures out X cannot be Howard, and she’s thrown into emotional confusion. She had assumed Howard was her father even though she can never quite connect the man she now knows with the journal entries about X. When she discovers Howard is not X—not her biological father—she has to reckon with who she is all over again. She is genetically tied to the manipulative X. He, not Howard, is her father. Who is she if her biological father is capable of such cruelty toward her mother? In asking these questions, Lina grapples with what truly makes someone a father.