SPELLBENT – Lucy A. Snyder
Jessie Shimmer, Book 1
Del Rey
ISBN: 978-0-345-51209-3
January 2010
Urban Fantasy

Columbus, Ohio – Present Day

Jessie Shimmer lives with a man who excels in magic and uses that supernatural talent to bring in the rent money. Cooper Marron helps Jessie tap into her very unskilled powers as both her mentor and lover. She also has a spirit guide, a familiar ferret named Palimpsest or Pal, as she nicknames him, who doesn’t talk to her just yet. Cooper has been having some bad nightmares, and Jessie’s concerned. He doesn’t think it’s a big deal and has them working on their next score that will net them easy money.

Cooper, along with Jessie as his aid, will bring forth a rainstorm to break a drought that’s causing major problems for the farming community outside of Columbus. As Cooper goes through his typical ritual, something goes very wrong, and he ends up opening a portal to Hell. Cooper is pulled in, leaving Jessie alone to fight a demon that has come out of the portal. Suddenly, Jessie's dead aunt calls her on her cell phone, and Pal starts talking to Jessie. It’s up to Jessie to subdue the demon, formerly known as Smoky, Cooper’s familiar fox terrier, and stop it from causing destruction in the downtown area. But, Jessie is still a novice and barely stops the demon and ends up almost dying and losing an eye and part of her left arm.

Even though it seems things couldn’t get worse for Jessie, they do. The leader of the governing circle of the seven powerful witches and wizards, Benedict Jordan, places a magical gag order on Jessie to stop her from rescuing Cooper. Jessie has to sign a magical binding contract or she will become an outcast leaving no one who can help her. She knows something is off with Jordan, and along with Pal, a ping-pong ball she uses for an eye, and the help of Cooper’s brother, Warlock, she’ll channel more magic and power so she’ll be able to walk through the fires of hell to get her man back and find the answers she needs. With enough willpower, she hopes to get her old life back, and hopefully grow back a new eye and arm so she doesn’t look like a freak.

SPELLBENT should have been another action packed urban fantasy combined with a bit of humor and edge-of-your seat action. Unfortunately, this debut by Lucy A. Snyder was an utter train wreck of unbelievably bad dialogue and badly edited scenes. Half the time I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Also, Pal the ferret, who’s a combination of reason and condescension, brings nothing mentionable to the plot or with helping Jessie.

The story is cluttered with descriptions that are so amazingly over the top and not in a good way. I thought it was bad enough when Jessie goes rooting through the garbage can for a used maxi pad for a magic spell, but I was mistaken, because it gets worse. When Warlock and his girlfriend, Opal, end up making some special creatures due to the combination of Opal’s menstrual period and Warlock’s sperm that was mixed together in a toilet, that was it for me. Among other scenes like this, I couldn’t figure out if Ms. Snyder was going for a more dark comical fantasy tale where she tried to succeed in writing something different that stands out from the normal urban fantasy series being published. If so, she hasn’t accomplished that in any way.

Jessie is annoying and very immature. There is really nothing to recommend her. The villain, Jordan, makes a very forgettable appearance. Warlock had his moments, but he was written as such a sad sack and as close to a drugged out hippie character as you can get.

The overall plot of SPELLBENT is in a word: dull. The motions Jessie goes through to find Cooper don’t deliver in any way and has a major lack of focus and the push needed to keep the reader interested. The writing is very much surface writing, as in there is no meat or depth, and by the time I finished reading, I couldn’t remember half of what happened.

SPELLBENT is a very weak book that strives to be something more and fails in every way.

Kate Garrabrant