Book Review: Something Like Fate

I’m a fan of both Amy Lea’s adult and YA romcoms and her newest upper YA, Something Like Fate, was a really fun read!

Amy Lea has said that she was inspired by the 90s romcom, Only You, starring Marisa Tomei and Robert Downey Jr. for this book. It’s not a wildly popular movie, but what’s funny is that I know the movie and watched/loved it as a kid! In the movie, Marisa Tomei’s character and her best friend/sister-in-law travel around Italy looking for her soulmate based on a name she got from a Ouija Board when she was little.

In Something Like Fate, Lo is a college student who is going to backpack around Italy for the summer. Her late mother died when she was too young to really remember her, but she knows her mom and aunt backpacked around Italy when they were young and she wants to visit the same places to sort of connect with her and honor her. Lo’s family on her mother’s side also all have psychic abilities and over the generations have blended their Chinese fortune telling with western psychic beliefs. Everyone has some sort of psychic ability, except Lo has never exhibited anything. That is until days before her big trip. She has a vision that she is going to fall in love with her soulmate in Italy! Extra excited for her trip now, Lo and her best friend Teller head to Italy. Life can’t get any better – she’s going to Italy and going to visit the same places her mom did, she’s going to meet her soulmate, and Teller is going to be with her and he knows her better than anyone.

I loved this book. It was fun and I loved Lo and Teller. It also made me wish I was in Italy eating all the pasta right now! Teller was such a good character and I loved how kind and reliable he was. Lo was really relatable as a young, college-aged woman. She was a little too naive and stubborn at times, but I suppose that makes her even more realistic! The only thing that slightly annoyed me about the book was that Lo and her 2 aunts were a little too stubborn/close minded about some of her visions and I would’ve thought that with their abilities they’d be more open-minded and welcoming to interpretations. It didn’t seem believable that they would be so fixated on certain pathways for Lo. But that’s just my opinion!

Overall, I loved the book and thought it was a really fun read.

Read this if you want an upper YA romcom with some steam that has characters traveling around Italy and the friends to lovers trope.

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