Less-Known Books: Enchantment
Like many of my friends and coworkers, I love books. Often I’m surprised that my friends have never heard of a book I particularly love. I think there are enough of them that I could post every other Thursday for the next year: I hope my friends and enemies will post their favorite books I might not know about in return.
Enchantment, by Orson Scott Card
After all the fairy tales he had read and studied, the one possibility he had never entertained was this: That they might be true…
When twentieth-century scholar Ivan Smetski discovers and saves Sleeping Beauty from the spell of the evil witch Baba Yaga by proposing to her, their troubles have only just begun. Together, Katerina and Ivan must save her kingdom from the evil witch, who has enslaved the bear-god and uses his power.
Orson Scott Card is a master of character, and Enchantment shows the true power of his writing and creativity. We see the rich relationship between Ivan’s parents; the interdependence between the kingdom and the king in Katerina’s time; the truce between the Church and witchcraft; and the slow discovery of marriage between Ivan and Katerina themselves. The treatment of marriage is enlightening and joyous.
Card is rightfully famous for his science-fiction novels, especially the Ender series. But Enchantment is one of his best, and is certainly worth a trip to the library or amazon.com.
March 19th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
Agreed. I’ve given copies of this novel as gifts to a couple of friends because I liked it so much, but before today I’ve never found anyone who cared about it as much as I did. I’ve had similar experiences with books by Lawrence Watt-Evans.
March 26th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Whenever I recommend OSC to people, I tell them to start with Ender’s Game so that they can understand Speaker for the Dead. The family dynamics in that book (plus the really unique conclusion) make me love it with a passionate love.
Enchantment is a really good book too, my favorite of his fantasy books. But like a lot of his other ones, I feel like it ends a little bit abruptly. And frankly, I wish he had been a little bit more circumscribed in some of the relationship/sexual details, but that’s not a knock against the book, just where I’m at personally…