Title: Spell Bound Author: F.T. Lukens
Published: April 4, 2023
Genre(s): Paranormal
Page Count: 336
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Edison Rooker isn’t sure what to expect when he enters the office of Antonia Hex, the powerful sorceress who runs a call center for magical emergencies. He doesn’t have much experience with hexes or curses. Heck, he doesn’t even have magic. But he does have a plan—to regain the access to the magical world he lost when his grandmother passed.
Antonia is…intimidating, but she gives him a job and a new name—Rook—both of which he’s happy to accept. Now all Rook has to do is keep his Spell Binder, an illegal magical detection device, hidden from the Magical Consortium. And contend with Sun, the grumpy and annoyingly cute apprentice to Antonia’s rival colleague, Fable. But dealing with competition isn’t so bad; as Sun seems to pop up more and more, and Rook minds less and less.
But when the Consortium gets wind of Rook’s Spell Binder, they come for Antonia. All alone, Rook runs to the only other magical person he knows: Sun. Except Fable has also been attacked, and now Rook and Sun have no choice but to work together to get their mentors back…or face losing their magic forever.
Featuring a pair frenemies-turned-lovers teen sorcerers out to save the world, F.T. Lukens’ Spell Bound is a fun, fast-paced YA novel well worth reading. My hot take is that the story and characters lacks grounding and depth, but not to an extent that ruins enjoyment of the novel as a whole. Overall, it’s a good read.
This is not my first book of Lukens’, and some aspects of their writing are becoming clear to me. This is not an author who’s overly interested in explaining why things are. If you like detailed character backstories or meticulous world-building, these are not the books for you. Lukens tells their readers that a thing is so, and that’s often all the explanation that we get.
The story here gets going right away: Rook, a non-magical person, has made an illegal device that enables people like him to see magical ley lines. He convinces the most powerful sorcerer in the city to hire him as office staff, then winds up clashing with very traditionalist and by-the-rules Sun, a fellow sorcerer’s apprentice. Things get messy, things get complicated, but by the end of it all, the day is saved.
Yet conspicuously missing from the text is any explanation as to how the magical society Rook and Sun live in came to be structured the way it is. Lukens doesn’t explain how a corrupt and oppressive bureaucracy came to power, nor what its actual agenda is. And at a smaller level, the protagonists’ backstories are only barely sketched in; any information that isn’t absolutely necessary for the plot is kept off the page.
On one hand, this light-on-details narrative enables the action to get started immediately, which works well for an accessible teen read about queer sorcerers. Simultaneously, the fact that the reader is thrown head-first into a unfamiliar world with no time taken to explain why things are the way they are can make it hard to connect. Most books would probably explain why its protagonist is averse to physical touch, for instance, since that’s an important character trait that comes into play in a few key moments. Lukens chooses not to do that. Instead, we are informed that Sun doesn’t like touch. No further elaboration is warranted, apparently.
And for the most part…it works? For my part, I found Spell Bound more like watching a fun TV show than reading a book. The story satisfies an itch, yet Lukens’ presentation doesn’t satiate my curiosity fully. The reason I read books as opposed to watching TV is for the opportunity to more fully explore characters and setting, which is something that is obviously not part of this particular novel. (I will say that authors’ previous books, while similar in style, didn’t feel quite so bare bones.)
So, I would say this is a pretty solid book, but not one I’d read again or even think about a second time. The magical frenemies angle was very cute, and the found family defeating bigoted oppressors theme was poignant. I enjoyed reading Spell Bound, yet I was left wanting more.
