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Enchantment is the Orson Scott Card novel that takes him about as far from the Ender Wiggin material as he ever got, and the result is one of his most enjoyable books. The premise is a Sleeping Beauty retelling: Ivan, a Soviet-Jewish American graduate student doing fieldwork on Slavic folklore in Ukraine, finds a 10th-century princess in suspended sleep in an enchanted glade and accidentally wakes her up. Witch-cursed witches and political marriages and ninth-century court politics follow.
Card handles the time-travel mechanics with care. The historical period is rendered with the kind of research the genre rewards. The relationship between Ivan and Princess Katerina is built across genuine cultural distance, and Card does not shortcut the difficulty of mutual understanding. The fairy-tale machinery is honored.
Four stars. A genuine pleasure for readers who have been put off by Card's more polemical work. Recommended on its own merits.
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