What a truly fascinating and gorgeous read.
I couldn’t put it down!
This is a wonderful easy to read book with a plot unlike any other
If your looking for a book with a plot that will keep you completely captivated from first page till last then this is the one for you!

An interesting read, but I just struggled to connect with Katherine's writing style. The premise was there, it just didn't hit the mark for me.

I enjoyed this dive into the human condition. Everything the author described resonated deeply with me. Her experience of pre and post pandemic life was so similar. The overall takeaway for me is to keep noticing the beauty of being alive, even when life is sometimes boring and difficult. Tiny pops of awareness of the wonders of the world are to be taken regularly like wake up medicine. I'm going to recommend this book to all my contacts, it's a big topic for us and this book perfectly encapsulates some of our bigger conversations.

There were some very lovely lines in this, and a number of times I smiled, or even laughed; it was often beautifully written, but it didn’t grip me, I can’t say I enjoyed it. Ms May wrote about things that seem obvious to me, but seem to astonish her - maybe I’ve been lucky!
Thank you to NetGalley for providing this book for review.

This was not quite what I was expecting and I struggled to engage with the writing. There were certainly some beautiful observations to enjoy but the author's style was a bit too meandering and self-reflective for my taste. On saying this I think that it would appeal to others and the cover is stunning.

I had trouble getting into this and try as I may I found that it jumped around too much so had to keep going back to check I hadn't missed anything. It may be more about me not feeling it rather than the book. I will leave it for now and try again sometime in the future as it does seem a very helpful comforting book

I could certainly appreciate the brilliance of Katherine May's book but unfortunately I just couldn't get into it. I found the writing too intense and therefore hard to 'feel'. I'm sorry as I think it is a great book and I think I will come back to it in the future.

I think this should be essential reading for everyone at the moment. It's such a comfort to read, and to take these thoughts into your everyday life, I found myself nodding along as I was reading then remembering the text the next day whilst endlessly scrolling on Twitter. It's a beautifully written book and doesn't feel pushy or intimidating which I find sometimes these books can.

‘Enchantment: Reawakening Wonder in an Exhausted Age’ by Katherine May
‎
Faber & Faber; 2023

ISBN: ‎978-0571378333

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain


This book’s author, Katherine May, is also the author of the beautiful and deeply haunting book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times which was a best-seller in 2020, and this new one is written in the same personal, self-disclosing style and with the same flair for beautiful, poetically expressive language.

May has produced, once again, a very personal and wonderfully readable account of her own inner experience of troubling life events. This time, she is describing, in intimate detail, how it felt to experience the Covid pandemic lockdown, and how it felt when lockdown was officially over. And as we know, the pandemic happened in a time that was already troubling enough, what with climate change, species extinction and the renewed threat of nuclear war. How does one navigate through these stormy waters as a mother with a young son? As she says: Even before a global pandemic arrived, we were trapped in a grind of constant change without ever getting the chance to integrate it. Those rolling news cycles, the chatter on social media…

The part that rings a particularly loud bell for me because it echoes the same experiences I have had in the past with my own children and grandchildren, is the one in which May speaks of her desire to inculcate in her young son the same feelings about the natural world that she has and her realization that he is seeing and experiencing totally different things – things all his own. There is no way she can gift him with the same sentiments and attitudes and pleasures that she herself had had at his age – or at any age. What he is seeing and feeling when he walks with her in wild places will be forever a mystery to her. She hasn’t – and will never have – any say in the matter and she is finally able to accept this. My son must make his own holy ground … Sacred places are no longer given to us, and they are rarely shared between whole communities. They are now containers for our own meaning. They don’t translate across minds.”

What finally emerges for May, after the rigors and restrictions of the lockdown, and despite the ever-growing and ever more grim problems our planet is experiencing, is the renewed sense of wonder and awe that she seeks as she embarks on various personal pilgrimages – to the mountains, to the moors, to a sacred well, into the sea – and sometimes finds, albeit not always in the ways or the places she expects to find it. As she says when she tells us about her experience of seeing her own shadow by moonlight – something she has never consciously witnessed before: Perhaps I’ve never found the right darkness before. Perhaps I wasn’t ready for it to unpack its meaning as it does for me here and now. I have gone looking for one thing and found another, not something rare and celestial and beyond my control but something that was always there… That’s what you find over and over again when you go looking: something else. An insight that surprises you. A connection that you would never have made. A new perspective

Like Wintering, this book, structured in four sections that echo the primary elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water, is a deeply thoughtful, philosophical and autobiographical account of one highly sensitive and intelligent woman’s quest for meaning and for a Gaia-based faith that takes us from the everyday world of tasks and trivialities to a deeper world of meaning, connection and wonderment in which everything is OK just the way it is.

Katherine May has been searching for the sense of enchantment she feels has disappeared from her life, partly through the pandemic and partly due to losing the threads of her childhood.

It is not easy to find a sense of enchantment once it has been allowed to disappear and we have to work hard to make the reconnection. This book shows us how that is possible.

I enjoyed each chapter as it looked at different elements of the natural world - earth, water, fire, and air. Each of these has something to teach us about ourselves and the world we inhabit, but we need to stop in the hectic pace of modern life and learn to reconnect, to listen to what is around us and cherish it anew.

Katherine May has struggled with burnout and is candid about the way this has impacted her life, especially through and following Covid. She is determined to find a way of restoring the fragile balance of her life and to reawaken the sense of wonder she once had, especially as she wishes to pass this on to her young son.

Nature is full of things that we can take for granted and often miss, simply because we fail to stop for long enough to breathe and let ourselves be in the space around us, whether that space is a wood, a beach, or our own back garden.

At one point, Katherine takes off her shoes so she can feel the earth tingle through the soles of her bare feet connecting with the earth. It sounds so simple and yet is profound because it demonstrates an attention to the landscape and its capacity for renewal.

This is a thoughtful and nurturing book, especially in how it chronicles Katherine's journey of self-renewal through the prism of the natural world.

I received a digital ARC of this book via Faber and Faber Ltd, in return for an honest appraisal.

This is a beautifully written book focused around the author’s struggles to rediscover herself in the aftermath of Covid. She has an incredible way of describing exactly what is going on inside her head using clear and precise, yet lyrical, language.

It has taken me a long time to read this book because I have been reading it in little sections in the mornings - it is like having a heartfelt conversation with a friend every morning and I will miss her now she’s gone. In some places it felt like she was talking about me, especially the part about the swimming lessons. It was like reading something I could have written about myself (although not half as well). Her descriptions of Meniere’s disease were so raw and real - she really has an impressive way of communicating her inner world to her readers.

Each chapter reads like a train of thought, but a highly polished one. Each word serves a purpose; there are no extraneous ones. It is a very tightly written book, to be read with a feeling that it all flowed out naturally in the first draft (but I’m sure it didn’t!).

My favourite part was ‘Fire’ because I could relate to everything she said about writing - what happened to her also happened to me, although sadly, I never started writing again. For most of the book there is a melancholy tone which does pick up near the end. This book didn’t leave feeling uplifted but instead, I felt understood, which is perhaps more valuable and more real.

I highly recommend this book to, well, anyone who likes reading. But especially women who have been feeling a bit lost and disconnected. This book won’t fix you but it will help you feel less alone.

With thanks to Netgalley and Faber & Faber for an advance review copy. All opinions are my own.

Oh, this was such a beautiful, nourishing, calming read. I read it in a few short sittings, the narrative captivating me in a way nonfiction books don’t often manage to. Enchantment’s blurb describes it as ‘a balm for our times’, and that certainly matches my experience of reading it – as if something buried in these words has started healing something that I didn’t really know needed healing. The language Katherine May uses is soft and lyrical, and I found some of her sentences flowing over me and wrapping around me in much the same way a spell would.

Seeking change and a softening, Katherine May goes in search of enchantment, of wonder, of ‘a better way to walk through this life’. Enchantment, she says, is essential for us to feel connected: to each other and to the earth. She explores the magic of earth, water, fire and sky, letting attention and rituals show her a different way of connecting, of finding enchantment.

I was so excited to read this. Wintering has been on my radar for ages although I haven’t quite managed to get round to reading it yet. Katherine May was the keynote speaker at the CIEP’s annual conference last September. Her talk was beautiful – soothing, empowering and comforting – so I was looking forward to spending more time with her words.

I was relieved to find that her words were just as beautiful written down. Enchantment is full of rich and careful language; almost every sentence has something of value in it, some nugget of gold to take away and turn over in your mind. And the richness of language feels like the perfect reflection for the beauty in the world that Katherine May is discovering and exploring and sharing.

I was captivated by her idea that enchantment is essential: not just a nice feeling to have occasionally, but something we need to regularly experience. She’s right, I think, and it’s easy to see how far modern society has slipped away from these ideas of enchantment and connection. I also particularly appreciated how clear and candid her voice is; reading this felt like being told a very gentle story by an old friend.

It's a book I can see myself returning to again and again when life feels too chaotic or unsteady, and Wintering has certainly been bumped much higher up my TBR list now. I’m really looking forward to seeing what Katherine writes next – what other adventures of the mind and soul she takes us on.

(With thanks to NetGalley and Faber & Faber for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.)

I'm always pleased to read about someone spending time in nature and after the lockdown issues, the author says she felt replenished by nature. She had a habit of getting burnt out, from college to raising a family. The first step I'd advise her to take is leaving all her social media, especially twitter, which she knew was a constant distraction.

The writing is nicely considered, as the author wanted to be a poet. But the first section feels too self-absorbed. The parts I like best are when we are being told about something, like the Brocken spectre, keeping bees, a well, sea swimming. Really, most people and what goes on inside their heads, are not fascinating to anyone but themselves.

Some readers may identify with the author's issues; and some may just put the book down to get back to the shouty Russian trolls masquerading as normal twitter users. I would recommend the author concentrate more on nature and local history writing, either fact or a social history novel, to reach a wider readership.

I read an e-ARC from Net Galley. This is an unbiased review.

This is a book about mental health and the finding of moments of "enchantment" to help with your mental health. These are often linked to nature but also some places that have been "spiritual" sites through time.

It has much to say on reconnecting with the past and our land especially when the pandemic texted many people's equilibrium. It's brave in opening up the "soul" of the writer , who bravely challenged their own times of depression and rumination.
The moments of enchantment described illuminate the dark giving moments of clarity and epiphany ( in Joycean terms" .

A courageous and enchanting meditation in times of mental heath crisis.

Katherine May is a talented writer and a capable story teller. I enjoyed her style and skill with words. A rich, almost musical prose worth reading. The premise of Enchantment was a solid one. We, today, are burdened by the weight of constant contact, instantaneous knowledge of world events, pressures from every direction that leaves us feeling flat and ground down. I couldn't agree more with her in this regard. I suppose I failed to find synchronicity in the vignettes meant to inspire enchantment with the natural world around us. Yes, they are magical, in their way, but, for me, it failed to spark. I don't know what I expected but it may have been more of an appreciation of our everyday, possibly overlooked, beauty that surrounds us every moment. Finding peace and joy in the magic of nature and beyond. Taking freshly baked sourdough loaves out of the oven, seeing tadpoles swim and grow into frogs and toads, blossoms turning to fruit, Kites circling close above. Things at hand or spotted on walks out in the world. Maybe less travelling to far flung places for a chance to see what we expect to see? So worth reading regardless, I found this a useful guide.

Having loved Katherine May's 'Wintering', I was delighted to read this book.

Deceptively short, this book finds joy in the everyday, and in the world around us, but also acts as a rallying call- it argues that the systems and structures around us often don't serve our wider needs as humans, and strongly advocates for switching off.

A part of the book I found especially powerful was its discussion of 'masking'- the ways neurodivergent people often have to adopt certain behaviours to appear 'normal' or neurotypical in a world that often doesn't understand them, and how this consumes reserves of energy that need to be replenished somehow.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I recently read and loved Katherine's book Wintering, and was excited to receive a copy of this via the publisher on Netgalley. It took me a little while to feel as connected with this book (the fact that I was reading on my phone/Kindle might have had a little to do with this) but once I did, it got better and better throughout and I found myself nodding along in agreement to much of what Katherine was writing about. Another brilliant book - will definitely be recommending this to customers alongside Wintering.

What a – yes – enchanting book. Exhausted by the constant vigilance and doom-scrolling that seems to have only been made worse by the pandemic lockdowns, May sets out to find a different way of being, remembering simple pleasures taken in nature and the senses from her childhood and looking for them in adulthood, too. Enchantment is defined as “small doses of awe”, everyday interactions that bring joy wherever you find them.

Her personal experiences are of course woven through the book, particularly her interactions with the sea and return to sea-swimming after a loss of confidence, and the importance of friends is emphasised even though she also has adventures with her husband and young son, with one friend accompanying her back into the water and another giving companionship on two transformative visits to an old sacred well.

Even though she’s looking for almost a religious experience, the numinous something that hovers just outside our consciousness, she connects this more to a sense of community and practical and craft abilities and skills that need to be revived and handed down than organised religion.

I loved how when, confronted with a holy well, she doesn’t go all woo on us or know what to do, but also doesn’t expect an immediate experience, but has a think and comes back with some personal responses (and her friend).

Everything in the book seems rooted in practicality, attention and honesty: she loses the ability to absorb herself in a book, struggles with her meditation practice until she realises the whole system of being able to devote oneself to regular meditative times is probably predicated upon not being a mother and freelance but a man with people to look after the “stuff”, and she gives the best explanation of how the tides work I have ever read.

A lovely book I would definitely return to.

My online review published 29 March https://librofulltime.wordpress.com/2023/03/29/book-review-katherine-may-enchantment/

Absolutely love how Katherine May sees the world. Wintering was one of my favourite reads over the last several years and Enchantment picks up with reflection on how we marry our internal worlds with external life in a modern, digital world.

This book was really lovely, it was really lovely to read about mindfulness and magic in everyday life.