Enchanted Islands: A Novel

Based on the memoirs of Frances Conway, Enchanted Islands is a fictionalized account of one woman’s struggle to find a balance between her real life and the secrets she knows but cannot acknowledge. It is also a novel of how women’s lives changed during the early middle 20th century.

Frances Frankowski, daughter of Polish Jewish emigrants, and Rosalie Mendel, also Jewish, but who is all that Frances, or Franny, is not. Rosalie is pretty, vivacious, and in Franny’s eyes, well off. “Rosalie’s family was from Germany, and her house was filled with books. I often stayed to supper and her mother served meat, real meat, not just chicken.”

Franny lives in a small apartment with her parents and six siblings. “. . . all the children were piled into the one bedroom in our apartment, my parents on the sofa in the living room with the newest baby.”

The friendship between two girls from such different backgrounds and personalities and its impact upon their lives is a major theme of Allison Amend’s novel. “Friendship between women is complicated. We can be kind to the world, but where other women are concerned, we often show our basest selves.”

At age 14 Franny’s and Rosalie’s lives began to diverge. Franny’s parents insist she forgo high school to take a secretarial course. Franny, who dreams of going to college is devastated. Rosalie, on the other hand, is expected to attend college. The girls’ friendship continues, but there are undercurrents to Rosalie’s life that puzzle Franny. “I find it hard to believe now that I didn’t understand what was happening.”

When Franny discovers that Rosalie is exchanging sexual favors with the middle-aged landlord to pay the rent on her family’s home, Franny is shocked and disbelieving. She is even more horrified when she learns how hopeless Rosalie’s life is. “Her mother knew. Her mother had arranged it.”

Unhappy with her own constricted life and desperate to help Rosalie, Franny makes the first of the decisions that will change the course of her life. “I decided then that we should run away together.”

The two girls take the train to Chicago where Franny finds a job as a secretary at the Mays Company, where she meets Zeke, a dedicated Zionist. Zeke begins courting Franny, pushing her toward a sexual relationship she is uncertain she wants. She tells Rosalie, thus setting up a betrayal by her friend that sends Franny running away, another decision that impacts her life.

Franny stops in Nebraska where works for the suffrage movement, and attends college. From Nebraska she moves to San Francisco where spends more than two decades teaching school. She is unmarried, has no home but a boarding house, has never answered the letter she received from Rosalie years before, and bored. “My fiftieth birthday found me wanting a change.”

She accepts a secretarial job in the Twelfth District Office of Naval Intelligence, where she meets Ainslie Conway, tall, unbelievably handsome, ten years younger than she, and a Lieutenant Commander in Naval Intelligence. In other words, Ainslie is an undercover agent, a spy.  

When her commanding officer asks her to marry Ainslie and accompany him on an undercover mission to Florena, one of the Galapagos Islands, Franny is “unable to muster the appropriate muscles to produce speech, even my brain was paralyzed.” Even though she knows she will accept the mission, she says nothing, taking two weeks to consider her decision.

It is on the cusp of her decision that a chance encounter brings Franny and Rosalie together again. “I was jealous of Rosalie, the way I had always been, the way I would always be. I wanted to one-up her, or at least even the status.

She tells Rosalie she is married even though she isn’t yet. Once again Rosalie has everything Franny doesn’t: she is still beautiful, married to a wealthy man, has three children and an active social life doing good works. Franny brings Ainslie to dinner at Rosalie’s, which is when he learns that Franny is Jewish. He isn’t appalled, but neither is he comfortable.

After their marriage, there is no intimacy between them, and three times Ainslie fails to come home. Franny doesn’t ask why; she is an intelligence employee and knows better than ask his whereabouts. Also, she feels the inequities between them. “I was an old maid. I had never been the pretty one, and age had not been kind to me . . . I should be grateful that I had a husband at all.”

Such is Franny’s mindset as the couple arrived in the Galapagos Islands, their mission to investigate the tiny German community to discover if any are Nazi agents. The U.S. government believes the Germans may want to build a base on Florena, an idea that seems ludicrous now, but was of concern during WWII.

It is the Conway’s arrival on the Galapagos that the islands become a character as strong as any in the book. Florena is desolate and life is hard. Franny and Ainslie build an open-sided hut for shelter, plant a garden, and live without electricity, running water, and suffer hunger on a daily basis. Food is scarce and Franny becomes thin, her skin dry, her face gaunt, but for the first time in her life she feels she has a home.

Enchanted Islands is a brilliant work of fiction, with characters so well-drawn that one feels they must live next door, or at least, just around the corner. Franny is the most vivid and the most knowable, and we view all the characters through her eyes. The most unknowable is Ainslie, because Franny doesn’t really know him. Rather she does, but like many instances in her life she keeps her knowledge secret even to herself.

A rich tapestry of plot, setting, and most of all, character, Enchanted Islands is a rarity: a truly readable literary novel.