Love & Gelato

Love & Gelato is two novels, one recounting the summer that high school junior Lina Emerson, reeling from her mother’s death, decides to stay in Florence to finish high school and the other recounting the year and a half that Hadley Emerson, Lina’s mother, spent in Florence studying photography at the city’s prestigious Fine Arts Academy.

In this structure, Love & Gelato is a contrapuntal narrative with storyline shared by two first-person narrators whose stories are kept separate from each other, each distinct in itself. Either Hadley’s story or Lina’s story could easily make a stand-alone novel. But, as chapters move between the two narrations (underscored by different fonts), the storylines enrich each other, reflect each other, and even parallel each other. Each storyline, while maintaining its integrity, helps reveal the importance of the other.

The term “contrapuntal” itself comes from music, most widely known through the intricate Baroque keyboard compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). In these works, the left hand and the right hand play two different melodies, unlike other styles of keyboard composition in which both hands build on the same melody and chord structure. In contrapuntal compositions, the left hand and the right hand are independent, and their melodies maintain their own integrity and identity. The staggered simultaneity of the two hands playing two different melodies, however, creates an entirely unexpected vertical harmony. Despite two melodies that have nothing to do with each other, the two structured together create a rich (and elegant) harmony. A helpful example would be an elementary school music class rendition of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in which one student begins the melody and then the next student begins the song a few measures later. It should produce chaos, but it does not. Rather, the contrapuntal weave of voices in staggered simultaneity gifts the simple tune with a richness it does not have on its own.

Here, the two narratives—Lina’s first-person account of her summer in Florence interspersed with entries from her mother’s journal—together create the urgency and emotional implications of Lina’s choice between Thomas Heath and Ren Ferrara. As such, the journal narrative supports Lina’s own journey to self-discovery. The entries reveal to her an emotionally complex mother she never really knew who faced a similar choice to own and felt she made the wrong decision. Hadley’s story shapes Lina’s story, and Lina’s story redeems Hadley’s.