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.