Enchantment
By: Orson Scott Card
My Rating: Four out of Five stars
Best for: 16 and up

How about this: Deep in an ancient forest, a 1990’s grad student studying the history of creepy Russian fairy tales finds a girl asleep on a pedestal in the woods, so he kisses her.

And she wakes up.

And he’s transported 1000 years into the past.

And they want him to marry the princess.

And he’s supposed to become king.

And the wicked witch wants to kill him.

And he just wants to go home and graduate college.

Enchantment was a lot of fun. It’s time travel, fish-out-of-water, love, magic, duty, honor, fairy tales, and religion. It’s authentic dark ages, it’s marrying for love, it’s discovering who you really are and being happy about it.

It’s has Orson Scott Card’s standard religious undertones and his odd obsession with being naked. If you aren’t familiar, there’s nothing sexual about the naked stuff…for some reason he feels the need to call out when people are naked in his books. I always find it odd, but at least it’s easy to tell when it’s OSC writing!

There is some language, a bit of violence, attention given to being naked, discussions about circumcision, and a couple of PG sex scenes. If Enchantment were a movie, it’d be rated PG-13. I’d say appropriate for readers 16 and up.

Happy reading!