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Rosie has been a writer and publisher; more recently she pivoted to wedding planning. She’s had opportunities to coordinate weddings in Ireland and in distant locations. She’d really enjoy being able to just move to Italy, where many of the destination weddings she helps plan take place. It’s a crazy notion, but maybe someday she will be able to pull it off.
In this memoir, Rosie Meleady shares the background of how she did eventually end up in Italy as an Irish expatriate. As I found out towards the end of the book, she started a blog during the Covid pandemic lockdowns and wrote all about how she was in Italy, a country that had a notoriously bad hotspot of deaths. Knowing that, the style of the book made a lot of sense. It does read like a long meandering tale, simply chronological from year/situation A through to year/situation F. I felt often that it could use a bit more structure.
At the beginning, this was most the case; I was thinking about DNFing it around the 15% mark on my Kindle. But I did come back to it and found it got more interesting, so I did finish. I also see that she’s written several more books continuing the story that begins in this book. Here, she ends with buying a house in Italy, and in other books, the renovation tales continue. In real time, she is now close to opening up part of the large house for paying guests.
A Rosie Life in Italy is basically an introduction to a long collection of blog posts, edited together in five books to this point. I’m guessing this being made available to reviewers on Netgalley is to open it up to American audiences. It is fun, and a great travelogue. Rosie is an entertaining storyteller and makes her adventures come alive on the page. If you love Italy, stories of expatriates buying homes and settling into the Italian life, you’ll very likely be satisfied with this.
Rated: Mild. Profanity includes around 15 instances of moderate profanity, about 35 uses of mild language, and 15 instances of the name of Deity in vain. Some mild references to sex or innuendo. Some talk about alcoholism and some of the consequences of alcoholics’ choices.
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*I received an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
