One-line summary: What if beauty could change Everything?

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This book is drenched in sunshine, bursting with flowers and kisses, full of the human potential for transformation. We follow four very different women who’ve rented a castle in Italy for a month to ask themselves questions like, “Who am I?” “Am I a good person?” “What makes a life feel fulfilling?” “Can people change?” “Are our better days behind us?” Just typical Italian-vacation questions, of course.

By the end of this book, they’ll all have arrived at hypotheses for these questions (some more quickly than others), and this is when the book goes downhill for me. Because it seems the answer, regardless of context or of the situation, is Love. Conceptually, I don’t disagree; I can see myself coming to the same conclusion after a month of relaxation in Italy! But the way it was executed in this novel made it feel shallow, like a cop-out after it raised such interesting questions. The nuances between the women are erased, their personalities smoothed over in the face of an idolized concept of love. Unfortunately, love feels like an alien force that has descended upon this castle, wiping away these women’s personalities and dreams, rather than the natural outcome of beauty, which is what I think the author wanted to get across.

This book ended just as it was getting really interesting and most ripe for character development. It’s a short book, and if Elizabeth von Arnim had just dedicated few more chapters to these women’s interiority it could have been so good. But the book keeps shying away from any true conflict, papering over it with grand notions of romantic love or dodging it like Lady Caroline dodging men, and so it falls apart at the end.