Another beautiful, determinedly uplifting volume that manages to transcend typical self-help books ... May mixes memoir with reportage to diagnose and alleviate what ails not just her, but modern culture ... Enchantment glimmers with resonant, offbeat observations ... May’s prose reaches for the heavens as she describes what she is searching for: 'the chance to merge into the wild drift of the world, to feel overcome, to enter into its weft so completely that sometimes I can forget myself.' Fellow seekers will be enchanted.
May is no dilettante and these are not hobbies; she is thoughtful and serious in her approach to experiencing the natural world in order to get back on her footing. Wonder, she knows, is all around us but we must be open to it.
It’s hard to pin down a feeling defined by ambivalence, but Katherine May articulates post-COVID numbness in Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age with precision and forthrightness ... May unpacks the predicament we’re all in and refuses to give an easy answer—there is no get-enchanted-quick pill ... Her lyrical, often funny, earnest guidance is grounded in basic human nature but leaves room for our own unique paths.
Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age offers similar meditative pleasures as her previous collection ... May doesn’t gloss over her feelings of awkwardness and inadequacy ... May details the small disappointments and larger surprises she encountered on her journey, and her sentences, plain yet gorgeous, cast a spell ... Though May’s search for enchantment seems perhaps better suited to the English landscape, with its fairy tale-like ancient sites and villages, than to our American suburban sprawl, Enchantment offers a lovely, meditative way to begin another tumultuous year.
Featuring lyrical writing and clear open-mindedness, the narrative will speak to anyone feeling lonely in the modern world ... May’s pursuit of enchantment will resonate with anyone feeling burned out or disconnected.
