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The Uses Of Enchantment
by Heidi Julavits
The Believer editor's third novel tells the story of a teenage girl who may or may not have been abducted from a practice field at her prep school.
Doubleday, 368 pages
10/17/2006
$24.95
ISBN: 0385513232
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Publishers Weekly
The mystery of what did happen to Mary Veal will enthrall the reader to the very last page. [10 July 2006, p.49]
Kirkus Reviews
Potent and intoxicating: a dangerously seductive book. [15 June 2006, p.594]
Boston Globe Julie Wittes Schlack
A riveting, at times deeply funny, disturbing book.
The New Yorker
Julavits expertly keeps the reader baffled until the end, but beneath the mystery is a sophisticated meditation on truth and bias.
Washington Post Lily King
In some aspects, Heidi Julavits's intricately constructed third novel, The Uses of Enchantment, is a classic postmodern examination of the complexity and irony of narrative. But relax. Julavits, in her probing of the politics of storytelling, does not deny us a good story; The Uses of Enchantment is also a highly compelling, old-fashioned quest.
New York Observer Ruth Davis Konisberg
God knows how many psychoanalytic workbooks Ms. Julavits had to slog through—or how many couches she had to lie on, for that matter—to pull off such a great send-up of the talking cure.
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Catherine Bush
While the almost super-articulate quality to the dialogue gives it a strangely heightened effect, its tension, and the spikily observed shifts in power, make these scenes both fascinating and compulsive reading.
Bookslut Melissa Albert
Julavits’s refusal to pity Mary keeps the book and its central mystery free of pathos or manipulative intent. This calculated approach lends even the humor a painful edge, and allows a true chill to pervade an unsettling, smartly drawn kidnapping, the players of which can almost convince you that they weren’t to blame.
Booklist Whitney Scott
A moodily atmospheric yet sometimes wildly funny tale of sick, twisted love, into which Julavits effectively reels the reader by juxtaposing past and present, factual and conjectural sequences. [15 Sept 2006, p.27]
New York Review Of Books Sarah Kerr
It's an interesting conception of this most communicative of art forms, undeniably. And still one senses that Julavits's writing, fleshed out with a fuller range of feeling, could aim higher.
Library Journal Laurie Sullivan
In her third novel, Julavits proves to be something of a sorceress herself, weaving a commanding, sophisticated narrative that is both vivid and dreamlike.
The New York Times Book Review Emily Nussbaum
There’s a neat puzzle-box quality to the way Julavits sets forth these themes without ever really resolving them. But the book is most successful at exploring the psychology of a particular type of teenage girl, an apparently colorless figure who reveals under pressure a perverse bravado.
USA Today David Daley
She's a shrewd observer of family dynamics. But Julavits is less successful with making her characters real. Her men are pushovers, Mary's sisters are paper-thin, and even Mary remains an enigma.
Salon Marisa Meltzer
It's unfortunate that in a novel driven by the central question of whose story it is to tell -- and one that allows so many voices to tell the story -- the only one missing is 16-year-old Mary's.
Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
A crisply written but overcomplicated novel, a cat's cradle with so many overlapping fibs, stories-within-stories, allusions, and red herrings that even multiple readings won't release all the knots.
Village Voice Alexis Soloski
Julavits seems to valorize deceitfulness as a creative act, and often a kind one, while honesty comes off as shallow and hurtful.
The New York Times Janet Maslin
Though The Uses of Enchantment is written with sharp, sometimes captivating eloquence, it remains disappointingly hollow in the final analysis.
San Francisco Chronicle Heller McAlpin
Mary Veal's story is ultimately a sad one, but it bothers and bewilders without, alas, bewitching.
 The average user rating for this book is 4.3 (out of 10) based on 3 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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