THE ROAD TO VILLA PAGE

A married couple recall their misadventures while buying and renovating a house in France in their debut memoir.

After years of working as TV writers in Hollywood, Cynthia and William Royce were ready for a new adventure. While on vacation in the charming Dordogne region of southwestern France, William proposed that they realize his long dream of living in Europe by buying an inexpensive property to fix up. “This is when his dream started to really scare me,” Cynthia writes. As chapters alternate between their two perspectives, the couple tell the story of their shuttling between Los Angeles and the quaint villages of Périgord Noir, where they searched for a house while also trying to adopt an infant they didn’t want to raise in Hollywood. They eventually settled on the idyllic Villa Page, a 200-year-old former hunting lodge with a private island, but humorous misunderstandings, often linked to their lack of fluency in French, plagued the purchase and eventual remodel. A cranky architect suggested that their Parisian real estate agent was a gangster, the former owner’s homespun electrical work left exposed wires, and their friendly neighbor casually revealed that the warped floors probably resulted from the year Villa Page didn't have a roof. Just as things started coming together, they received the happy news from California that they could adopt a baby girl, who soon joined their family. Cynthia and William mine the he-said, she-said structure for plenty of comedic irony—Cynthia refers to a property as “a ruin” while William describes it as part of a “dream…taking flight”—but the device never becomes cloying. While long descriptions of the renovation can be less interesting, both writers excel at describing their cultural and linguistic mishaps, from mixing up numbers to having to pantomime “lawn mower.” The first installment in a planned memoir series about their move, the book includes dozens of pages of high-quality, uncredited color photographs of Villa Page and its environs. Throughout, they pepper their story with just enough French vocabulary, wine, and cheese to give the entire book that certain je ne sais quoi.

Two expatriates take a lighthearted and well-structured look at trans-Atlantic cultural differences.