Jenna Evans Welch Books in Order

If you want the full travel-romance journey: Love & Gelato → Love & Luck → Love & Olives
If you want the easiest place to start: Love & Gelato
If you like road trips and sibling drama: Love & Luck
If you want Greek island family tension: Love & Olives
If you want a witchy standalone: Spells for Lost Things

Jenna Evans Welch was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and spent her early years there before a big teenage move changed her sense of what the world could look like. When she was 15, her family moved to Florence, Italy, and she lived there for two years. Welch has said the shift felt huge. She had grown up in a pretty small bubble, and suddenly she was in a place full of new language, history, food, and ways of living.

That feeling of expansion runs through her fiction.

She has also said she knew she wanted to write for teens when she was about eleven. She was a voracious reader, but when she wandered over to the teen shelf at her local library, the selection felt tiny and not especially adventurous. She missed the magic, mystery, and sense of possibility she loved in younger books, so she made herself a promise: one day she would write the kinds of stories she wanted to find there.

The road from that promise to publication was not neat or easy. In her twenties, she wrote an early draft of Love & Gelato and was deeply discouraged by it. She knew the kind of book she wanted to write, but not yet how to pull it off on the page. After struggling with the manuscript, she put it away for a while. During those years she worked on her father's books, helping with research, editing, and even the occasional scene, which gave her a close-up look at how professional storytelling actually gets built.

Then the shelved novel came back to life.

An editor saw promise in Love & Gelato, Welch was given the chance to rewrite it, and she did, several times. The finished novel became her debut and her breakout book. Readers connected with Lina's summer in Tuscany, where grief, art, family secrets, and first love all arrive at once. Welch followed that success with Love & Luck, a road-trip story through Ireland, and Love & Olives, which heads to Santorini with an estranged father, Greek myths, and talk of Atlantis. Together, those books became her trademark girl-abroad stories.

Place matters a lot in her work. Welch has said she likes to visit settings for research because facts alone are not enough for her; she wants the sounds, smells, small details, and daily rhythms too. That shows up on the page. Florence feels warm, crowded, and full of discovery. Ireland gives her room for sibling friction and healing. Santorini brings bright views, sea air, and the kind of beauty that makes old family problems harder to ignore.

She changed gears a bit with Spells for Lost Things, but not completely. The book keeps her interest in belonging, romance, and family tension, then adds Salem, Massachusetts, and a light magical thread. It is still very much a Jenna Evans Welch novel in the way it pairs atmosphere with emotional mess. Readers who like her books often come for the travel and flirting, then stay for the deeper questions about trust, home, and identity.

Across her fiction, Welch returns again and again to teens who are uprooted, grieving, or stuck between versions of themselves. Romance matters in these stories, but it is not the whole point. Her characters still have to figure out who they are on their own, which is probably part of why the books feel comforting without feeling weightless.

She now lives in Salt Lake City with her husband and two children. When she is not writing, she has said she is usually chasing her kids or making elaborate messes in the kitchen. That feels fitting for a writer whose books are always in motion.