Going to be honest, I liked the Love and Olives premise more than I did Love and Gelato, but I felt like Love and Gelato had better characters and a better plot.Īll in all, it was a cute read. Love and Olives’s story revolved around the theme of losing inhibitions and forgiveness, whereas Love and Gelato was centered around grief and confusion and looking for guidance. The list of similarities goes on, but Love and Olives did manage to break the script in places. Both go by nicknames (Olive becomes Liv, and Carolina becomes Lina), and even these nicknames are pretty similar. Fathers who haven’t exactly been present in the protagonist’s upbringing.Īnd then, there’s the matter of the characters’ names. I mean, the similarities were glaringly obvious.īoth stories begin with the main character visiting their fathers in Europe. It was nice to see cameos of different characters, but I couldn’t help but see how Love and Olives was literally a carbon copy of Love and Gelato. However, unlike Perkins’s books, they happen simultaneously, over the course of the same summer in three separate European countries. What was nice, however, was that the books (Love and Gelato, Love and Olives, and Love and Luck) are connected, but not a series, not unlike Stephanie Perkins’s trilogy. The book was sweet, but it could not contest with Love and Gelato. Perhaps I knew it would be hard to top the predecessor, or maybe I was just lazy (probably the latter), but it took me over two years to approach Love and Olives. Love and Gelato is one of my favorite reads, but I was hesitant to read Jenna Evans Welch’s other books.

Love and olives book