Name: The Enchanted
ISBN: 9780063036697

Rene Denfeld

A Novel

The Enchanted

The enchanted place is an ancient stone prison, viewed through the eyes of a death row inmate who finds escape in his books and in re-imagining life around him. A female investigator searches for buried information from prisoners' pasts that can save those soon-to-be-executed. Digging into the background of a killer named York, she uncovers wrenching truths that challenge familiar notions of victim and criminal, innocence and guilt, and reveals shocking secrets of her own.

a novel

The enchanted

Rachel Kanyid

I thought this was very beautifully written and quite engaging, but NOTHING like I would have expected.

Even monsters need peace. Even monsters need a person who truly wants to listen - to hear - so that someday we might find the words that are more than boxes. Then maybe we can stop men like me from happening... A prisoner sits on death row in a maximum security prison. His only escape from his harsh existence is through the words he dreams about, the world he conjures around him using the power of language. For the reality of his world is brutal and stark. He is not named, nor do we know his crime. But he listens. He listens to the story of York, the prisoner in the cell next to him whose execution date has been set. He hears the lady, an investigator who is piecing together York's past. He watches as the lady falls in love with the priest and wonders if love is still possible here. He sees the corruption and the danger as tensions in 'this enchanted place' build. And he waits. For even monsters have a story...

Alice Myles

4.5 stars (I may change this in the future but for now let's leave it at this)

My rating for this book is slightly confused because I went through a vast majority of the book feeling. "hey this book is really good I'm so glad it was recommended to me" but only feeling that. It didn't get me excited but it was still very, very good. However, the last couple of pages had such a huge impact and it really made the whole story come alive which meant I gave it the extra 0.5 for the pure sense of awe I felt after finishing.

When you read the title "The Enchanted" you expect it to be about fairies or some other sort of magical creature, the last thing that you expect is a book about a prisoner on death row but let me just say that this book is a gem. The language (especially as a debut novel) is exquisite. The use of metaphors and flowery almost pretty language juxtaposed perfectly to describe the scenes which should be gruesome and dark emphasising with the magic-realism style of the novel. Having the entire story told from the inmate's point of view made for an interesting read too because he was narrating the others' thoughts, so the only parts we know to be true are the things that he himself thought. As I mentioned above, the whole story is development, even as I was nearing the end no part truly felt like the climax.

All in all, I highly recommend this book even if you only read it for how beautiful the language is ( that's pretty much what inspired me to read it), it deals with harsh subject matters in a really raw way and makes you think and you will likely leave with more questions than with which you entered.

Lauren Tabor

I don't know if this genre of book is for me. It's realistic, but not....like you don't really know if it's really or not. I know there are some book where I don't mind it, but for the most part I like either a full on magic system or fully realistic. Of course there are exceptions to this, I'm sure there a many books I've loved that have little pieces of magic. I guess for me I like to KNOW if it's really happening or not because I just feel confused and not in a good way. This whole book was weird, and sad and I don't really know if I fully appreciated it. I can see that it was beautifully written. I guess I can just see that this wasn't really for me. So I didn't hate it, but it wasn't something I really enjoyed either. I guess it mostly made me feel a bit depressed.

Amy Vicknair

Definitely not a fun read ....but a really good read.

Jen Estrella

Your worst dungeon might be the room with the most windows.
Oh dear. I'm sitting here trying to process what I just read and failing miserably. Where do I even start? This is a story about a horrible place told in the most beautiful way. To be honest, I had a difficult time getting into this, but I couldn't stop once I understood what the author was trying to do. Also, that ending really caught me off guard. Now here I am finding connections in the characters' stories and their thoughts and the imagery, and I cannot stop. There are so so many themes in this book that are worth discussing (e.g., trauma and abuse, the power of/human capacity for imagination/escapism in the most horrible situations and places, empathy for those we consider unforgivable, injustice in prison, redemption) I could go on and on, but I think I'll just leave you with this paragraph. 
  Men who have not been violated don’t understand what it is like to have the edges of your body blurred—to feel that every inch of your skin is a place where fingers can press, that every hole and orifice is a place where others can put parts of their bodies. When your body stops being corporeal, your soul has no place to go, so it finds the next window to escape.

My soul left me when I was six. It flew away past a flapping curtain over a window. I ran after it, but it never came back. It left me alone on wet stinking mattresses. It left me alone in the choking dark. It took my tongue, my heart, and my mind.

When you don’t have a soul, the ideas inside you become terrible things. They grow unchecked, like malignant monsters. You cry in the night because you know the ideas are wrong—you know because people have told you that—and yet none of it does any good. The ideas are free to grow. There is no soul inside you to stop them.
What a brilliant book, certainly one that I would think about for a long time.

Jennifer

The Enchanted may had intrigued me with its atmospheric prose and imageries about the notion of storytelling in the beginning, but was ultimately let down by the graphical subplots & the lack of connection back to the main character. Both dragged the middle portion of the book. For some reason I just couldn't get into a big chunk of the novel due to the graphical details. So this is one of those books which has the prose that I would usually enjoy but ended up being a disappointment due to sloppy execution in the writing.

N.B. This book contains following triggering content: slavery, childbirth, abuse, corpse, isolation, death, murder, illnesses, and gore

Elena Garcia Navarro

This book was brutal and really well crafted. 

When I read the last sentence, I felt like starting it again which doesn't happen often to me. I can see myself re-reading it in a future.

This was one of those novels that made me glad to have picked the audiobook up out of nowhere. I have the background in criminal justice and have seen the debates against the death penalty time and time again, but this was a very unexpected point of view.

I like the fact that you're never really sure about what the protagonist did, but you know he wants to die and you slowly learn his back story.

sera

How wrong was I... from the title I thought the premise will be something of magics and all, in a way it is but very depressing.

Dani C

I don't write reviews BUT this warrants one. 

The writing style was magical and poetic. BEAUTIFULLY written. 

The story line is addictive. I read this book very quickly, which is hard for a toddler mom to do. I didn't want to put the book down. 

So why only 3 stars? 

The story is incredibly dark. This is heavy stuff. I have no clue how this ended up on my to-read shelf and didn't reread the synopsis before checking it out from the library. This is not the kind of book I'd usually read. Do I regret reading it? No. Would I have picked it up had I just seen it at the library and read the description? No. Would I read it again? No. 

Maybe this review should be taken with a grain of salt. But I can't get over how brilliantly written it was. If you want to go out of your comfort zone and prison life/death row isn't your forte this is the book for you. If you like this sort of content you'll probably love this book. But if you want to stay in your comfort zone, don't pick up this book.

Laura

So, I’m opposed to the death penalty. Mostly. I don’t feel passionately about it and that doesn’t mean I’m some kind of bleeding heart, it just means I don’t think killing prisoners solves anything. So, despite the fact I’m on the same side of the author, I was still worried about how this book was written, figuring it would be too heavily skewed one side, and that death penalty supporters would all be tarred with the same ugly brush. But this book is full of nuance. It looks at every side of the issue and makes each side sympathetic. I’m shocked at how much depth there is to this slim novel. The writing is, of course, beautiful, the plot is gripping, and the characters are fantastic. I have not felt this much towards characters that weren’t even named in a long time, and I was completely won over to the side of Denfeld’s characters. My only complaint is that it felt a bit like propaganda at times. But this is an honest, brutal portrayal of prison life highly worth picking up.

Mary Coggins

Emma Kimbrough

Katie Boedecker

azliana aziz

Lindsy Rice

Autumn Wolf

For the narrator locked inside an ancient prison, waiting for death, life is full of magic, from the golden horses that stampede underground to the tiny men who hammer away inside the stone walls. That the enchanted place is a death row matters less to him than the people he watches from the bars of his cage: the lady, an investigator hired to help the men escape execution; the fallen priest, brought by shame to work the row; and the kindly warden, who ushers men to death. As the lady digs deep into the past of one of the men on the row, she finds secrets that ring chillingly familiar, and begins a journey that will bring all of them to unexpected salvation. Guilt and innocence collide in this story of the beauty that can exist in the midst of despair. A luminous novel about redemption, the poetry that can be found in the unfathomable, and the human capacity to transcend even the most nightmarish reality, The Enchanted is a new classic.

The Enchanted A Novel