So I really, really loved Philosophy Made Simple, Hellenga's later novel that I read over a year ago. The Sixteen Pleasures sucked me right in, and I liked it way better than some other novels I've read about Americans in love with Italy. The Sixteen Pleasures follows an American girl in her mid-twenties in the mid-sixties who, feeling a quarter-life crisis, decides to move to Florence to help with book restoration following the horrendous flooding. She'd spent two years of high school in Italy, and has amazingly positive, powerful memories and associations of living in Florence with her now-dead mother (Her father is the protagonist in... Philosophy Made Simple! Huzzah!). She befriends some nuns while staying at a convent, and the plot really picks up when she discovers pornographic engravings bound in a Renaissance prayer book. She's extremely believable, even for being a female character written by a man. I enjoyed it.

People say that God works in mysterious ways when they really mean that life, or something in their own lives, doesn't make any sense, but I think that's wrong. I think it means that we can't make any sense out of life until we give up our deepest hopes, until we stop trying to arrange everything to suit us. But once we do, or are forced to . . . That's what's mysterious.

Fun travel or summer read. I like the one that came after about the father even better.

Lovely summer read, makes me want to return to Florence!

I found the subject matter and main character interesting but the pacing of the book was far too slow for my liking.
Also, the main female character seemed a bit hollow. She was lacking personality. I liked her but wasn’t moved.

An intelligent book written for cultured people. A young female book restorer offers her services to one of the Florentine convents that has been deluged in the great flood. In amongst the sodden tomes she comes across a unique and historic work, a slim volume depicting sex positions. What she subsequently does with the book affects her entire life - her future.
A talking point is that the male author is writing about a female heroine and, in these days of political correctness, can probably expect flak for doing so. Yet the only part of his female sensibility that didn't quite work was when she is dumped by her lover. Although the author protests how much his heroine is hurt, you don't feel it. Her experience just seems to be flat. But it's a cavill. And the ending which at first feels slight, is in fact a very grown up one.

Margot is a book conservator and has headed to Florence, Italy to help restore some books after a flood in 1966. She ends up in a convent, helping the nuns with their library, where she finds a rare 17th century book with erotic poems and pictures. The nuns would like to sell the book and be able to use the money, but the books and the library are owned by the bishop and they know he won’t allow it.

This was ok. I found the book conservation parts of it interesting, but I really didn’t like Margot, nor any of the other characters, except for the nuns. It was a bit difficult to figure out right at the start, as it flipped back and forth in time and was a bit hard to tell where we were (in time), but that didn’t last long. It was pretty slow-moving, but it was ok. An author's note would have been nice.

This is not an erotic adventure as the salacious title and accompanying blurbs describe, but it is a look at female empowerment and growth. As the main character grows and expands and begins to exude confidence in herself, we are also treated to incredibly interesting and factual treatises on book restoration, shady dealing in the worlds of rare book auctions, the life of Carmelite nuns and their ever-struggles with the male hierarchy of the Catholic church etc. I found it all fascinating and delivered so well.

I did want to like this book but I gave up at p230 of 310 pages. It was very disjointed, moving from one thread to another in some very jarring ways. The main character Margot seemed to drift about aimlessly and Allesandro, the love interest, was a drawn very superficially. One minute they were professional colleagues, next minute they were in bed??? There were some long detailed passages about conservation and binding that were unnecessary in a work of fiction. I could have found the information elsewhere if I was that interested. Similarly, some of the long detailed converstations s with the nuns were of interest one one level but really didn't add a lot to the storyline. I have no idea why Margot even bothered to meet with the Bishop of Florence who ordered her to do a particular thing. He had no authority over her and I found the scene to be annoying. Nothing to trecommend here!

despite what it says on the back cover, this is not a romance or an erotic story. It is a book about book restoration, well told. There were no characters in the book I cared for, they were just the device for describing the rescue and restoration process, and the complexities of selling old books.

Was hoping for a much better story. Found it a bit pretentious with all the references to art history - felt like rather than learning things that instead, I needed to be an art history scholar to feel truly immersed in the book. Also, the switching back and forth between Italian and English seemed ridiculous - the characters were in Italy and spoke fluent Italian, so there was no need for the author to keep switching back and forth between Italian and English when the characters were speaking. They were in Italy speaking Italian, so keep the entire book in English if that was the primary language of your intended audience. There were some interesting parts as the female lead character matured and experienced new things in Italy, but overall I wasn't wowed by this book.

AH! va bene. Art history, travel, romance, Italy, food, self-discovery. I hardly noticed the time and pages flying by while reading this book. I absorbed it voraciously. I give it 4.75 stars. Deduction is because.... I don't know I loved it but what is perfect. The writing was wonderful, complex at times and poetic. I loved this :) oh it was so satisfying; she got what she wanted. although the author is not a woman, I thought the female perspective was not male gazey. I particularly enjoyed this because of my own experience in art history, and knowledge of Italy. it was like the dream book, go to Italy to work with art and have an adventure! wonderfully entertaining and sensuous and romantic. molto bene.

I'm not really sure why I had high hopes for this book. I'd never heard of it, never read any reviews. I guess I expected something different after reading the blurb on the back of the book, which was completely misleading. The real story had a good premise, and the writing was good, but I was mad that the sexuality was so tame. Anyway, the book is about a young woman, Margot, in the 1960s who travels to Italy to restore books that were damaged in a flood in Florence. She'd spent time in Florence as a teenager and felt a strong sense of nostalgia and yearning for it. Margot returned because she'd hit her quarter-life crisis and wanted to do something meaningful with her life. She works to repair and restore damaged books there, and winds up coming into possession of the last remaining copy of what is called The Sixteen Pleasures, an erotic book that had been assumed destroyed by the pope. She comes of age in Florence, while struggling with what she should do with the book and how to go about it.

The blurb led me to believe that it would be more about this young woman's sexual growth - that she would embark on a journey with the sixteen pleasures mentioned in the damaged book with her lover - but there was hardly any mention of it. Her relationship with Sandro happened very fast, and I think we were supposed to imagine that they were reading the erotic poems and acting it out, without much mention of it. I didn't find the relationship very credible, and never really liked Sandro. He didn't strike me as a trustworthy man, and I was never sure what Margot saw in him. So that was disappointing.

I think that the author's main strength was found when describing the setting and Margot's careful restoration, rather than in her relationship with Sandro. He was hard to like, and she was hard to like when she was with him. I wasn't nearly as seduced by him or by Florence during that period of Margot's life as she was. The book was more interesting without him around, when she was working on her own to salvage books - then, she was a strong, independent young woman who was truly coming of age, rather than just another 20-something who was moping over a married lover.