Spiritual longing and earthly delights blend in the tale of Margot Harrington, who, in 1966, goes to flooded Florence, where she discovers a one-of-a-kind book of Renaissance erotica and becomes involved with an Italian art restorer. 25,000 first printing. Like the Jimmy Stewart character who gave up his dreams for his family, Margot Harrington turned down Harvard, graduate school, and a job in her preferred career to care for her ailing mother. A 29, a librarian and book conservator at the Newberry Library, Margot decides to change her life and seek adventure. She travels to Italy after the Arno floods its banks to help rescue damaged books. When her money runs short, she moves into a convent to help the sisters restore their library. Margot finds more in Italy than she bargained for: a rare volume of pornography bound into a prayer book and an affair with a married man. Margot lovingly restores the book, with a plan to sell it to save the convent's library--unbeknownst to the bishop. While the plot has interest and erotic potential, it tends toward the academic. The style is somewhat arrogant, with its detail about book conservation and its Italian phrases. A marginal purchase. - Kimberly G. Allen, MCI Corporate Information Resources Ctr., Washington, D.C. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. Margot Harrington, a 29-year-old book conservator, is one of the many Americans who flock to Florence, Italy, to help restore its priceless treasures after the flooding of the Arno in 1966. She begins by volunteering at the Villa I Tatti, but soon, through the offices of an urbane, fiftyish art expert named Sandro Postiglione, she finds herself working and living at a Carmelite convent, helping save its valuable library. One of the books turns out to be an extremely rare volume of Renaissance erotica bound with a book of prayers. The mother superior asks Margot to find a way to sell the volume without the knowledge of church authorities in order to raise money to keep the convent library intact. Thus begins an odyssey that takes Margot to a rare book dealer in Basel, Switzerland, and to Sotheby's in London, as well as into Dottor Postiglione's bed. The novel has a few awkward elements, such as the underdeveloped device of Margot's glamorous double, Margaux. But on the whole it's a rewarding read, with a witty heroine, a marvelous setting, and lots of fascinating detail about book conservation and the restoration of art. Mary Ellen Quinn A wonderfully rich and absorbing story that seems far too assured to be a first novel. Hellenga forms Florentine art, nuns, erotica, and American know-how into a kind of della Robbia arrangement of juicy forbidden fruit. It is the fall of 1966. Florence has been devastated by floods. Margot Harrington, a book conservator from Illinois, joins the crowd of volunteers who descend upon the city to help rescue its art treasures. Margot's training puts her a notch above the ``mud angels,'' the unskilled student volunteers who wade into the murky basements of museums and cathedrals. But, as a woman, Margot is not quite accepted among the self-important ranks of male conservators. Forced to find her own way, Margot ends up working in the waterlogged library of a convent, falling in love with an older, married man and also coming, clandestinely, into possession of an extremely rare book, The Sixteen Pleasures, a volume of exquisite erotic drawings and sonnets from the 16th century. After some slightly awkward and unconvincing train-ride scenes at the beginning of the novel, there's not a false note here. Hellenga knows just how to build a story. The suspense he manages to create in a book auction scene rivals that of any thriller. In the course of mending books in Florence, Margot Harrington is releasing herself from the rigid bindings of her old life, and both processes prove to be absolutely compelling. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Robert Hellenga teaches at Knox College, Illinois.