Enchantments

the long version

"Written as a memoir and told in twenty-five short chapters, Enchantments reveals a young Italian girl living in Paris with her parents and siblings. For the most part it is a happy life - joyful, in fact - and full of the things that children of her particular world and time do. She chooses new outfits for her doll, buys horses with her father, takes a ship to the States to visit her mother's family, eats ice cream at midnight, plays with the local children on visits to her father's farm. There are the regular trials and tribulations of a child's life: being tickle-tortured by her brother, betraying her younger sister, envying a classmate. All the while the darkening adult world around her is only implied, though we deduce the role her father plays in her life, and as we slowly see the young girl growing up, realizing her powers, the novel moves toward its deeply affecting finale."--Jacket.