A Wedding in Lake Como

This third book in Probst’s “Meet Me in Italy” series (following The Secret Love Letters of Olivia Moretti) is a dual-timeline novel about best friends Ava, Madison, and Chelsea. They have grown distant from one another but are drawn back together thanks to a pact they made when they were college students on a memorable trip to Lake Como, Italy, to be there for one another’s weddings. Told from the singular point of view of Maddie, a loner who aspires to be a social-media fashion influencer, the novel shows how she befriends the more popular Ava and Chelsea as a freshman in college, falls in love, and gains career success. Through flashbacks, readers discover how the friends’ bond grows through new relationships and family dramas and later how a betrayal tears them apart. Carlotta Bretan does a wonderful job voicing the many characters in this story; the lack of multiple narrators does not detract in any way.