Enchantment, with its connotation of magical interference, is the perfect descriptor for love, and Leigh Stein's Land of Enchantment is a meditation on her experience in loving and losing the volatile and charismatic man she follows to New Mexico. In this memoir, love is a haunting, a bewitchment that never stops, even in death.
Prone to grand pronouncements and flights of fancy, Jason entangles Stein from their first meeting at a theater audition. Following a whirlwind courtship (replete with infidelity and the first signs of abuse), the pair embarks on a six-month stint in New Mexico. While the magical Sandia Mountains in the distance cast everything in their rosy glow, matters at home aren't so idyllic. Stein depicts Jason's verbal and physical violence with the foggy half-vision of one reaching for an old memory, occluded by pain, and her grappling is as moving as it is painful. Through levelheaded prose, Stein is a winsome, unflinching Virgil guiding readers through this labyrinth of remembrances.
Jason resurfaces continually after their failed attempt at southwestern bliss, only to die suddenly years later. This memoir is a testament to love's untidiness, its habit of fouling our best intentions and forcing us to ask ourselves, "How did I get here?" Stein, an alumna of the New Yorker's editorial staff and the founder of BinderCon, retraces her steps thoughtfully, in a book whose dark magic is as alluring as an O'Keeffe canvas. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer