Would be an excellent book club choice!

The Enchanted April is a gentle and amusing story about four women, strangers really, seeking a change of scenery, a respite from their daily lives, who share the financial burden of renting an Italian villa for a month-long holiday.

As the ladies stake their claim on various rooms and gardens of the villa, their personal flaws emerge. Their inter bickering was unexpected and it was the most pleasurable part of the story for me.

Mrs. Lottie Wilkins, in her 20s, is the wife of an overly ambitious lawyer whom she finds tiresome. It is she that initiates the idea of this holiday. Lottie’s spontaneous and a bit of an airhead, but she tries hard.

Next came Mrs. Rose Arbuthnot, traditional and pious, the forgotten wife of her scandalous writer husband. She just wants to be valued by someone.

By way of advertisement, they find Mrs. Fisher, an elderly entitled woman who is not very amicable. She has a controlling personality and likes to order people about. I thought of her as the grouchy grandma type.

And finally, there is Lady Caroline Denston, a 28-year-old socialite who is shallow and snobbish and kind of spoiled, though admired for her great beauty. She just wants to have time to figure out what she should do with her empty life.

Upon settling in and spending time in and around the villa, soaking in its charm, they each feel a sense of renewal and, thus, gain a new outlook on their lot in life.

“All the radiance of April in Italy lay gathered together at her feet. The sun poured in on her. The sea lay asleep in it, hardly stirring. Across the bay the lovely mountains, exquisitely different in color, were asleep too in the light; and underneath her window, at the bottom of the flower-starred grass slope from which the wall of castle rose up, was a great cypress, cutting through the delicate blues and violets and rose-colors of the mountains and the sea like a great black sword.
She stared. Such beauty; and she there to see it. Such beauty; and she alive to feel it. Her face was bathed in light.”

The twist infidelity occurs off pagethat came near the end was shocking and I wished it had had more to it. Perhaps a confrontation of some sort, instead it was politely hidden away with an excess of manners. Three of the women’s stories were settle satisfactorily, but the fourth I wished for more or knowledge that she, too, ended up happier, changed.

Overall, this was an enjoyable, light read with minimal angst. The pacing fit the laid-back surrounding of a holiday. This would be a great choice for book club discussions.

*Note: The audio book with Nadia May narrating was excellent, recommended.

Charming with gentle humor.

i love books about seasons

2022: After reading the print and copying down quotes, I upgraded this to 5 stars. The middle of the book had me in spasms of laughter. I'm in bed, trying not to wake my husband, but unable to keep from gasping and snorting while I read. A refined, affronted elderly dame, Mrs. Fisher spews forth fabulous lines, á la Downton Abbey's Dowager Countess.

Towards the end, Frederick could have been unmasked, as it were, by Lady Caroline, aka Scrap. But she shows mercy and discretion. He braces himself for a disaster. von Arnim writes: But he was reckoning without Scrap. Oh, this transported me to the end of Lés Misérables where we find the words, But we reckoned without God.



2020: Frederick had been the kind of husband whose wife betakes herself early to the feet of God.

My sister texted me that quote from Elizabeth von Arnim's charming book, and my interest was inflamed. However, I was knee-deep in Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago with a looming due date. But one can only ingest grim and grime so long, due date or no. I metaphorically tossed the Gulag aside for a dose of April. Then I chose the wrong audio. "No," my sister insisted, "you must listen to Helen Taylor's narration in Librivox." I restarted with Helen Taylor's lovely Oxford accent and gulped it down in two days.



While I listened, the book's atmosphere made me recall this photo I snapped of women reading on Monhegan, an island off the coast of Maine a few summers back.

And while the book is cozy and charming, it was not predictable in the way, perhaps, many cozy novels tend to be. Indeed, I'm curious about this new-to-me author: are her other works as good?