Description:
Seventeen-year-old Philippa Laakso was many things to many people. Caring and selfish. Kind to some, cruel to others. And now, she was dead.
When seventeen-year-old Philippa's body is found in her front yard, the police launch an investigation. Everyone close to Philippa is questioned: The elderly neighbor who discovered her body, who kept confusing Philippa with his late wife. The best friend, who hoards a secret stash of objects she'd stolen from Philippa over the years. The ex-boyfriend, still reeling from their sudden break-up months before. The woman who features, enraged, in some of the strange videos Philippa filmed on her beloved Olympus PEN camera. The older men she'd been meeting via a dating app.
Each tells a different story: she was a confidant, a fantasy, a temptation, a problem, a mystery, a mirror. But did any of them truly know her?
Enchantment is a spellbinding literary mystery that explores the uneasy terrain of girlhood, where one is always being watched, shaped, and judged by others. In it, Riikka Pulkkinen (called the "Finnish Joyce Carol Oates" by Livres Hebdo) weaves a complex story of power and identity, and the fragile boundary between truth and fiction.
Brief description:
Tabatha Leggett is a writer and literary translator from North Wales. She is a current Iowa Arts Fellow at the University of Iowa's Literary Translation MFA programme and a graduate of New York University's Fiction MFA programme, where she was an Axinn Fellow. Enchantment is her debut translation.
Review Quotes:
"Pulkkinen (True) offers up a gripping literary mystery centered on the death of an enigmatic 17-year-old girl ... [A] beautiful meditation on the brevity of youth and the thin boundary between truth and lies. This will stay with readers."
--Publishers Weekly
"Riikka Pulkkinen (True) challenges readers to form their own impressions with Enchantment, a striking novel about girlhood, perception, and death."
--Shelf Awareness
"An intricate tapestry of a novel by a masterful writer. Enchantment's real triumph is its investigation into what we mean to one another as imperfect people. I wanted to savour every sentence of this structurally impressive novel."
--Catherine Airey, author of Confessions
"This unsettling mystery by one of Finland's leading novelists follows the investigation into the death of a 17-year-old girl, a protean figure who held a wide variety of people in thrall while alive and continues to do so posthumously. It's a vivid, searing study of teenagerdom and Finnish society alike, with a bracing philosophical undertow.''
--The Telegraph
"Enchantment put a spell on me from the very first page. It's an engaging and thrilling literary mystery that masterfully weaves multiple points of view together into one intriguing investigation of identity and perception ... Mostly told in third person, with a little bit of second person, the chapters are unsettling, funny, sad, and heartbreaking, depending on the perspective from which they are told ... With poetic prose that makes one want to dissect every phrase, Enchantment questions which parts of ourselves are left behind when we die, and explores how grief manifests in different ways and is affected by how the person who has died is perceived. Exquisite from start to finish, this novel is well-crafted, poignant, and sublime."
--Jacinta Richards, Readings
Praise forTrue:
"Pulkkinen spins variations of [the] theme of transformative identity, having characters periodically relate to one another as if they were improv artists."
--New York Times Book Review
Praise for True:
"A beautiful, sensuous novel."
--Library Journal