pleasantly surprised

“I am so pleasantly surprised to be wrong—that there is a real appetite here, and a real moment for people to reengage locally,” Litman said.

“We were pleasantly surprised,” says Katie Tilford, interim executive director for the Theodore Payne Foundation, a nonprofit nursery and education center for native California plant life.

She said she was pleasantly surprised by how many kids and teenagers came up to ask questions and pose with a cardboard cutout of the former president.

I also was pleasantly surprised that he ordered an iced tea; I had stopped drinking alcohol a month before.

In essence, “The Book of Carol” lacks the layered heft those who were pleasantly surprised by the previous chapter might have expected.