Enchantment

Philippa Laakso was many things to many people. Caring and selfish. Kind to some, cruel to others. And now, she is dead.

When seventeen-year-old Philippa’s body is found in the yard outside her home, the police launch an investigation. Everyone close to Philippa is questioned.

The elderly neighbour who discovered her body, who kept confusing Philippa with his late wife.

The best friend, who hoards a secret stash of objects she’d stolen from Philippa over the years.

The ex-boyfriend, still reeling from their sudden break-up months before.

The mother whose children she babysat and who appears, enraged, in some of the strange videos Philippa filmed on her beloved PEN Olympus camera.

The older men she met via a dating app to whom she lied about her age.

Each tells a different story: she was a confidant, a fantasy, a temptation, a problem, a mystery, a mirror. But did any of them truly know her?

Enchantment is a spellbinding literary mystery that explores the fragile boundary between truth and fiction and the uneasy terrain of girlhood, where one is always being watched, shaped, and judged by others. In it, Riikka Pulkkinen weaves a complex story of identity, desire, and the quiet violence of being defined by everyone but yourself.