The Enchanted

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The Enchanted

by Rene Denfeld

Pages: 256
Genre: Psychological Thriller
Published: March 4, 2014

Purchase: Amazon | Powell’s

Inside, the lies you tell become the person you become. On the outside, sun and shrink people to their actual size. In here, people grow into their shadows.

 

4/5 stars

The Enchanted is a dark book that takes place in an ancient prison and is told mostly from the point of the view of an unnamed death row inmate. He doesn’t speak, loves to read, imagines gold horses run underneath the prison periodically, and somehow can sense what is going on outside his cell. Two other important characters in the book are a fallen priest who works at the prison and the Lady, who is an investigator hired on by family members of soon-to-be-executed death row inmates in hopes that she can dig into their pasts and find some information that will keep them from dying. At the beginning of this story she is working on a case for an inmate named York, who is ready to die and wishes his family hadn’t hired her. Only the inmates about to die are given names in this novel.

I really enjoyed this book. I expected it to be dark based on the subject matter, but I did not expect beautiful, lyrical writing about such harsh subjects. And this book really gets into the crimes these inmates have committed and what crimes have been committed against them while growing up.  It doesn’t stop there. We learn about what happened to the fallen priest and even some of the what happened to the Lady growing up and how it affects her career choice. I was surprised by how much I felt towards the Lady and the priest. I didn’t expect to feel that passionately about characters that weren’t given names, but I felt like I learned enough about them to care.

Even though I had heard good things about this book, I had never picked it up until it was a book club pick. I thought it might be a quick and easy read, but I found myself slowing down my reading to really enjoy the writing.

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