3 Key Takeaways – A Fragile Enchantment by Alison Saft

This is part of my ongoing video series of Three Key Takeaways from books I’ve read – the lessons we should take as authors from what worked and what didn’t work. You can view the original video here with the transcript below: https://www.tiktok.com/@rhiannondaverc/video/7350735582282140961

I’m a professional ghostwriter and these are my three key takeaways from A Fragile Enchantment by Alison Saft, which is one of my favourite books that I’ve read certainly this year. We’re only in the beginning of the year but I have a feeling it may last all the way through. Ah okay, let’s get into it.

So one of the things that this author does so well that I love so much and that made me really enjoy the book so much is my first key takeaway, which is use descriptions to show the character’s inner world. Let me explain what I mean by that. So within this book there are descriptions that show the way the character thinks.

Our character is a dressmaker. Her whole life is about fabric and sewing. She’s passionate about her job and it’s what she spends her whole life doing.

So listen to this description as she’s pulling up on the boat to this new place that she’s visiting. “Out in front of her, the Maclish sea rippled like a swathe of grey fabric, foam stitched like a panel of lace across its surface.” Just through that one line we understand how this character thinks.

She sees the world in terms of fabrics and stitches and she’s so focused on her vocation. It’s actually her calling. It’s her whole life.

It’s everything she sees. Later on there are descriptions of rooms where she walks through a room for the first time and she’s seeing it and she’s describing the curtains and the fabric on the bed and the type of carpet and the fabric used on the pillows and you can just feel who this character is through the descriptions. This is not connected to this book but I just watched an episode of Grey’s Anatomy and I wanted to bring that in as well because it’s actually a really good example.

I think this is in either the very last bit of season four or the start of season five, I’m not quite sure, but there is an episode where a character is talking about the fact that she’s having an affair, right? And she says I’m a married woman having an affair with my best friend’s husband. Irritatingly I cannot find the exact quote online and I didn’t write it down when I was watching the episode but it’s something like that and what I found very interesting about this is the way that the term best friend is centered in the middle of that sentence. She could have emphasized that she was cheating on her husband.

She could have emphasized that she was having an affair with a man but she didn’t do either of those things. What she did was she said I’m having an affair with my best friend’s husband so by centering the best friend in that sentence what we can see is that her friend is more important to her than anything else. That’s a really interesting character line because it tells me that these women have been friends for a long time and she values them and she’s probably been friends with them longer than she has been with her husband.

Later on in this episode or maybe in the next episode we find out that that is the case they’ve been friends since they were children and I understood that from the placement of two words in a line and those two words could have been put anywhere in the sentence. Those two words didn’t even need to be in the sentence but the fact that they were placed where they were placed shows us everything about the character’s inner life and it’s the same with the techniques that are being used in Fragile Enchantment. By describing things and putting words in certain orders we can show what our character’s inner worlds are actually like without having to tell the reader explicitly and that’s so valuable.

My second key takeaway is something that’s really general actually for romance books and it’s this: romance connections can be obvious. So when she shows up you just know immediately that the person she’s going to be falling in love with is the prince, it’s so obvious. This is called a boyfriend entrance and it’s when the author – and it doesn’t have to just be in books, it can be in comics or manga or you know any kind of art-based story, it can be in films and tv.

The boyfriend entrance is when the boyfriend kind of walks into the room and you look at him and you go he’s going to be the love interest because it’s made so obvious and this isn’t a bad thing. Being obvious in romance is actually a really good thing. Readers love it.

I have read so many reviews of different books where the readers are disappointed because they go well I thought she was going to get together with Bill and at the end she got together with Ted (don’t judge me for my name choices) and I’m really disappointed because I thought the author was telling us she was going to get with Bill. When the romance is really obvious you might think oh god well there’s nothing left to guess they’re obviously going to get together but no that’s the enjoyment. For most romance readers that’s the enjoyment is seeing the two characters that are going to get together and just hanging on for that delicious delicious journey of seeing them do it and the frustration when they take a step back when they should be taking a step forward and just waiting for it to happen.

It’s a romance. They’re going to be together in the end, they’re going to be happy, they’re going to get married and probably have loads of children… it’s fine for us to know that going in, that’s what we want.

My third key takeaway is this: a central mystery works in any genre. So I’ve said this in many videos before that having a mystery that draws your reader through from page one right to the last page is really valuable.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be the first page or the last page with a romance, obviously, they’re going to hang on because they want to see the romance but a mystery adds so much depth and it means that people who aren’t liking the main couple as much as they thought they would or who might be a bit frustrated with the slow burn – they’ll keep reading to find out the answer to the mystery so you then have more time to reel them in and convince them and make them fall in love with these characters. So it’s not just mystery and thriller books that can do mysteries well and I want you to think about Bridgerton because not everyone will have read this book but a lot more people have seen Bridgerton and they have a very similar mystery. In Bridgerton we have Lady Whistledown who’s writing a gossip column and in this book we also have a similar plot.

Bridgerton was not the first thing to do either, it’s Gossip Girl – they have a Gossip Girl character and I’m sure Gossip Girl wasn’t the first one to do it either that’s just the first example I have at the top of my head. Having a mystery like that, like who is this person, is really useful because it makes you inspect all the characters, it pulls you forward, it makes you guess, it keeps you guessing. I have to say I didn’t see the twist coming in this one of who the Gossip Girl character was even though it’s the oldest trick in the book when it comes to that type of mystery and I should have seen it coming.

I felt really annoyed with myself when I found out who it was but how great is that that I’m so engaged in this story and in this mystery that I’m like, oh no I should have guessed – and I’m talking about it now to you because that’s how much it impacted me. So that just goes to show a central mystery is really good no matter what genre you’re doing. It can really enhance the book and make it a lot more accessible and a lot more interesting to readers and give them something to talk about during and after reading the book. Those are my three key takeaways for a Fragile Enchantment.

If you know of any other books like this one, if you love this book and then there’s another book that you love that’s quite similar please please please tell me in the comments because I adored this and I want to read more like this. I loved the world building, I loved the the sewing element because I am a well I’m not a seamstress but I sew, I embroider so I knew the references and I love the time period setting as well even though it’s fantasy you know I love this time period. I should probably read Bridgerton now that I’m thinking about it.

Anyway let me know your recommendations and I’ll see you in my next key takeaways video.