The Enchanted

Beautiful writing about the ugly parts of the world. The lyrical prose of this hauntingly lovely book will stay with me for a while. 4/5

Sad, haunting, and beautiful.

There was beauty in the writing but I failed to connect with the characters. I also wanted more of the magical realism, more description of the prison and more fantastical elements would have engaged me more.

I sat in the parking lot several times just to listen more to this book. I can't describe it better than the blurb....it was very good at making me picture a scene vividly and interestingly. (I often skip the lengthy descriptions most books need).
Would recommend it.

I was enchanted by a novel about death row, about wounded souls and death and sorrow. This book is magical and disturbing and well-written yet sometimes very hard to read.

The sad fact of the matter is, my book club passed up this book. Thankfully, it was one of my choices and I already had it on my TBR list for this year. So I started reading it and I found I had a really hard time putting it down.

The interesting thing is there isn't really a story here. There is a telling. Observations and bits of tales all put together. Facts are blurry and we don't really know what these characters have done to find themselves in this enchanted place, but we don't need to know.

Denfeld has been compared to Alice Sebold and I can see that. She writes magically about a place that by all rights should have no magic. That one would never describe as “enchanted” as we tend to perceive enchanting. She writes about darkness by bringing it into a lighter place.

There is much that is left unsaid, but for whatever reason I wasn't bothered by this. I sighed when I closed the book after the last page. I didn't need more, I just wanted peace for the silent man and a cabin in the woods for The Lady.

The story reads like a grim, modern-day fairy tale.

It's partly narrated by a mute death row inmate who has retreated into the world of books and imagines golden horses running deep under the earth, miniature men wielding tiny hammers and clay bodied flibber-gibbets. It's his way out past the horrors of his previous deeds that even in the prison world of rape and murder remain unspoken.

The story follows the case of a death penalty investigator (author Rene Denfeld herself is a death row investigator) working to free a condemned man who simply wants to die. It could be irredeemably dark or sentimentally maudlin but manages to skirt the fine line for most of the narrative.

It's a short little book written beautifully, despite its at times brutal content, with a style I didn't expect from a prison drama.