REVIEW: Spellbent by Lucy A. Snyder

Took me awhile to finish this, but in the end Lucy A. Snyder's first book in a new urban fantasy series wasn't too bad. Dealing with a young sorceress trying to rescue her boyfriend from Hell, I think this might be the only story I've ever read where the main character lost half an arm and an eye in like the second chapter and kept them lost for most of the entire book. And even then what she gets back is hardly the same. The world is one that runs parallel to our own, where people referred to as "Talents" are able to weild various sorts of magic and the beasts of myth and lore are a lot less theoretical than we thought. Jessie, the story's heroine, is a Babbler, using various odds and ends to draw on their ambient spiritual power and perform various spells. With her is her familiar, a ferret named Pal, who possesses a wealth of magical intel and is actually a giant spider whose spirit inhabits the ferret's body as part of his criminal sentence. Blocked at every turn by a corrupt political leader only too happy to paint Jessie and anyone who could help her as the villians.

Honestly, while the story was awesome, there were some funny antics, and I really loved Pal, I found that there was just something off about the way the story flowed. Sometimes it was quick, other times she'd be doing things and I'd just be like "Um, don't you have something you have to be doing right now?" There was no character development that I could see and at times Jessie would say or do things that were just plain stupid. And then it's over and I was...surprised. I expected there to be something more to the story but aside from incurring trouble while rescuing the boyfriend this book really is about rescuing a man from Hell. Once he's rescued, the story is over. The End.

Don't get me wrong - it's a good book and well written - it's just that there's something off about the plot and its flow that irked me. I'm hoping the next book, Shotgun Sorceress due out in October, is better.

Oh - and lookey over to the right and check out the widget for Kelley Armstrong's The Summoning available for reading free online right here. And it comes with a contest you can learn all about with a click here. Enjoy!