The Enchanted April: Unabridged 1922 Womens Vacation Story

4.0 out of 5 stars A Charming Tale of Love and Hope On a dreary late-winter day in London, two young women spot the same advertisement in a local newspaper: San Salvatore, a castle on a hill above the Ligurian sea in Italy, is available to rent for the entire month of April. The pair, Lotty Wilkins and Rose Arbuthnot, hardly know each other but nevertheless scheme to escape their flagging marriages and disappointing circumstances by taking possession of San Salvatore for thirty days. They can only make it work financially by including two other tenants—the glamorous Lady Caroline Dester and the embittered dowager Mrs. Fisher—both of whom have their own reasons for escaping. Will the unlikely quartet learn to exist together well enough to find the idyllic holiday they are all seeking? Will the intoxicating beauty of the castle and its surroundings restore the love they all find missing in their lives back home? Learning the answers to those questions is just one of the pleasures associated with reading The Enchanted April. Written as it was about a century ago, it would be easy to regard this novel as merely a light-hearted, romantic look at a bygone time and place. However, that would be far too dismissive for what turned out to be a very satisfying reading experience. Indeed, author Elizabeth von Anrim has crafted here an ebullient and utterly charming tale, which, apparently, is something of an outlier in her catalog of work. She is also deeply insightful with respect to the multi-layered personalities and relationships developed throughout the story, a remarkable achievement given its brief length. The only two flaws I found in the book were the sometimes bloated and overly formal sentences that von Arnim crafted and the implausible (and hardly modern) resolution to Lady Caroline’s storyline. (In fact, the novel does wrap up rather abruptly, which left every character’s storyline feeling a little unresolved.) Still, The Enchanted April is a delightful paean to the transformative power of love as well as a book whose journey outshines its destination.