Katherine May (Wintering) offers poignant reflections on what it means to find--and feel--purpose in an age filled with a "growing sense of unreality" in Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age. The solution to our present-day woes of urgency and fear, she offers, is the titular enchantment, "small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory" and "the ability to sense magic in the everyday, to channel it through our minds and bodies, to be sustained by it."
May is far from the first writer to tackle the question of purpose or what it takes to live a happy life. But Enchantment stands out from an otherwise crowded field in the ways it feels at once grounded in the present moment, written on the heels of the Covid-19 lockdowns, and timeless in its questioning. This is not a book of advice or easy solutions but rather an invitation to explore our inner and outer worlds--and how readers might make meaning within them. "We have surrendered the rites of passage that used to take us from birth to death," May writes, "and in doing so, have rendered many parts of our experience unspeakable." And yet she succeeds, somewhat miraculously, in speaking to those very experiences across every page of Enchantment, recalling ocean dips in cold water, visits to hidden forest springs, long road trips to search the sky for meteors and the messy meaning-making found between these moments of awe. Enchantment is a treasure, one that invites grace, compassion and sensuality into our desire to find purpose in an often overwhelming world. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer