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A review by bdietrich
Enchantments by Kathryn Harrison
2.0
Enchanments was an okay novel.
Harrison's syntax tripped me quite often with her habit of putting the subject after the verb or placing parenthetical information where it was slightly out of place syntactically. It took me nearly half of the book to get the hang of it.
Additionally, the first half -and perhaps even further- was not too interesting to me because it didn't seem to have any point. Each chapter was just Aloysha telling Masha a story from the past or Masha telling Aloysha a story. As such, there was no rising action or climax. When we do finally get a climax, it is not very exciting at all and seems to not be the central focus of the plot at all.
I understand that there are always two sides to a story, but Enchantments put too much emphasis on how Grigory Rasputin was wronged... that he was totally innocent, as were the current Romanavs not 100% guilty of poorly ruling their country. I am not an expert on Russian history, and I am of the generation that watched the animated Anastasia as a child in the '90s, but I felt that Harrison was too generous in her portrayal of Rasputin and the Romanovs, which sat poorly with me.
Harrison's syntax tripped me quite often with her habit of putting the subject after the verb or placing parenthetical information where it was slightly out of place syntactically. It took me nearly half of the book to get the hang of it.
Additionally, the first half -and perhaps even further- was not too interesting to me because it didn't seem to have any point. Each chapter was just Aloysha telling Masha a story from the past or Masha telling Aloysha a story. As such, there was no rising action or climax. When we do finally get a climax, it is not very exciting at all and seems to not be the central focus of the plot at all.
I understand that there are always two sides to a story, but Enchantments put too much emphasis on how Grigory Rasputin was wronged... that he was totally innocent, as were the current Romanavs not 100% guilty of poorly ruling their country. I am not an expert on Russian history, and I am of the generation that watched the animated Anastasia as a child in the '90s, but I felt that Harrison was too generous in her portrayal of Rasputin and the Romanovs, which sat poorly with me.