Here's why Kari suggests A Room with a View...
Young Lucy Honeychurch has spent her life quietly in the English countryside until the summer she goes to Florence, Italy, chaperoned by her straitlaced cousin. There, her view changes. 'And why should she not be transfigured? It happened to the gods.'
About the book
A Room with a View
by E.M. Forster
'"But you do," he went on, not waiting for contradiction. "You love the boy body and soul, plainly, directly, as he loves you, and no other word expresses it ..."
Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate son George.
Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life in Italy and the repressed morals of Edwardian England, personified in her terminally dull fiancé Cecil Vyse. Will she ever learn to follow her own heart? --Goodreads.com
"More than a great love story. It's both a lighthearted and deeply impassioned inspirational lesson about life" --Chicago Tribune
"The literary equivilant of [a] hot buttery mashed potato..." --Independent
About the reader
Kari Kiernan, Assistant to the Head of School
Kari previously recommended:
Homecoming by Yaa Gyasi