The Sixteen Pleasures: A Novel Reviews

Sixteen Pleasures is the story of one American woman, who like many others across the world, picked up and went to Florence after the devastating flood of 1966 to help save the masterpieces in so many of the museums and churches there. Our heroine is a book restorer, who will probably lose her job at home for going on this adventure, but decides that is all she has to lose. The title of the book comes from an erotic manuscript banned by a long ago pope that the nuns find amongst their library. But although she becomes obsessed with saving this book, and therefor the nunnery, the story is more about her love affair with a married Italian man, with long descriptive pieces about how she painstakingly rebinds the book. I found myself skipping the parts about her work even though I thought I would enjoy learning about it. The book went by quickly, but something was missing, and the plot was overly predictable and the foreshadowing outright blatant. I admit that I rarely think men write well from a woman's perspective, but the first half of the book rang true. However, when she gets more confident, that voice loses itself, and the author even goes back and forth from first person to omniscient narrator. Such an interesting topic, so sadly executed.