Customer Reviews

Enchantment

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I found Enchantment to be a 288 paged whine. It is a story of a girl named Hannah. I was given this story to read for a "coming of age" theme. This character NEVER meets this requirement, she is stuck in immaturity and I was unable to feel empathy or anything for Hannah. There was no order or plot and nothing ever seemed to happen. It was well written considering that the story had nothing. But witty did not save the book. I thought it was dreadful.

According to an article she wrote for Allure, this is Ms. Merkin's autobiography. At least up until age 26. Basically it is a memoir of her growing up years, her need for her mother's love, and her mother's complete lack of interest in the fact that she needed that love. With six children in a strict Orthodox Jewish household, it wasn't as though her mother did not have the time to spare for each child; she was just busy with invitations to business dinners, phone calls, and spending time with her husband. Her father was a millionaire businessman, but she was never interested in obtaining his attention. It was her mother whom Ms. Merkin obsessed over.

Her mother was German, and wanted to become a surgeon. If she had, she certainly wouldn't have had a very friendly bedside manner. When Hannah (Daphne) cried, she was told "Your tears don't move me". The children's nurse was allowed to do as she pleased: bang Hannah's head against the wall, spank all the children with their pants pulled down, even kicking one of them. When Hannah asked her mother why she had married her father, she was told it was none of her business. When she and one of her young sisters fought, her mother told them that they were both bitches.

Although this was an apparently very wealthy (3 or 4 maids, the children's nurse, cook, laundress, chauffeur, a beach house with a pool) family, and Hannah took trips and had expensive (if not the ones she would have chosen for herself) clothes, it reminds you that there can be different kinds of abuse within a family. What you see on the outside is not always what is on the inside. This book reminds me of Small Sacrifices by Ann Rule. Diane Downs said that as the oldest of five children, her mom did not have time to spend with her, and that some children just need their mother more. Ms. Downs wanted to talk with her mother, but her mother spent her time with her father, not her...she grew up to kill one of her children, and almost kill the other two. At least Ms. Merkin grew up to become a talented, successful writer, basing this book on her mother's indifference to motherhood, and using beautiful prose throughout.

What most impressed me about this novel was how believable the characters and situations were, such that it read like an autobiography more than something someone just made up and put together into a novel. Merkin's prose is effective and enchanting.