FRENCH LESSONS

An American divorcée starts over in the French countryside in Samuels’ novel of renovation and romance.

In 2003, Barbara Waldheim, a language teacher and tour guide, starts her life over after the end of her marriage when she buys a restored farmhouse in southwestern France. As she fixes up her new home, she navigates all the rituals and customs of life in the French countryside. Construction, plumbing, and planting must all be done according to idiosyncratic rules that a foreigner must learn, as construction gets underway, Barbara plants roots in her new community, befriending charming neighbors with unconventional love lives. Between settling in and taking trips to smaller, lesser-known areas of France, Barbara is on the lookout for a man to share her life with: “I was willing to kiss quite a few frogs to find one who might turn into a prince.” After a few underwhelming encounters, she finds an unexpected partner in Sam,a Romanian contractor who shares her lust for life. As their relationship grows more serious, Barbara must rethink her vision for her new life and decide if she’s ready to make another change. Samuels weaves Barbara’s adventures in homeownership in the early 2000s together with flashbacks of her adventures as a foreign exchange student in Paris in the late ’60s. Like a picturesque French farmhouse, the story has good bones: Barbara’s adventures reveal many engaging tidbits about French life and history, going broader and deeper than the many other escapist books set in France, which tend to focus on Paris or Provence. Some descriptions of renovation are overly intricate; it’s easy to get lost in the many different approaches to plumbing and caulking techniques. Often, the sections about home repair are more detailed than the portraits of Barbara’s neighbors, friends, and lovers. Also, the love scenes are sometimes stilted and perfunctory, and Sam’s characterization isn’t as detailed as one would hope for a serious love interest.

Lengthy description bogs down an often-compelling tale of France and the joys of living abroad.