A Plea for Better Writing: A Rant Review of Spell Bound by F.T. Lukens
WARNING: this review contain spoilers. It is also long. Think of it as a dissection of the state of the genre, through the lens of this book.
Blogger also struggles with formatting posts this large, so I apologise if there are any issues.
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There’s this book of writing advice called How Not to Write a Novel by Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman. It's full of basic, but undeniably solid instruction.
Spell Bound by F.T. Lukens is a great case study for why, seventeen years after its initial publication, books like How Not to Write a Novel are still relevant. Every other paragraph of this ‘fantasy’ ‘romance’ holds some new writing failure that would fit right in with the joke examples Newman and Mittelmark set out.
So imagine my surprise that somehow, Spell Bound holds overwhelmingly positive reader reviews on Goodreads and Storygraph.
The Rebuttal
One says, ‘Well, Natalya, this is a Young Adult romance; it’s not going to be a literary masterpiece.’
And I say to ye, ‘The YA and romance genres deserve decent writing.’
One of my favourite series (The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater) is a well-written Young Adult. As for romance, I offer Jane Austen.
I don’t expect a literary masterpiece--those are pleasant surprises. What I do expect when I invest my time (and often money) into your story is a decent read.
Young Adult and especially romance are genres frequently dismissed. The readership overwhelmingly comprises not straight men, and especially comprises women. Media women consume doesn’t need to be taken seriously; therefore it doesn’t need to be good. It is excepted from the standards of storytelling because its storytelling isn’t considered storytelling at all, just frivolous cheap entertainment. Straight men aren’t reading romance, so who cares?
Well, I do. Romance readers deserve better standards, and LGBT readers especially deserve better.
Just Bad
There are lots of different ways to write a bad book. My favourite is Empress Theresa style, where the writer is genuinely putting their best effort forward--they just don’t understand that storytelling has techniques they could have studied.
Spell Bound by F.T. Lukens isn’t bad in the Empress Theresa style.
Lukens knows how storytelling works. They know what a plot structure is and how it should function; construction of character and character development; theme and repetition. They know of the minutiae of how to construct a sentence, how paragraphs should flow, how word and imagery choices have secondary implications.
F.T. Lukens knows how to write a decent story. But for Spell Bound, it’s like they couldn’t be bothered.
Spell Bound baffles me. It cannot even follow tried-and-true writing adages. Think show don’t tell; don’t repeat yourself; don’t take an inexplicable potshot at actress Evanna Lynch. The basics. Think of them, because Lukens didn’t.
Spell Bound is bad in a particularly heinous way. The writer knew how to make a decent story, but respects their readers so little they didn’t have the passion to do a basic edit to ensure this ‘comfortable’ read hit the minimal standards for a painfully acceptable story.
The Technicalities of a Review
To be clear, this is just a bad romance book. A dime a dozen. But I’m exhausted with the low standards. At this point, 'bad' in the context of 'romance book' is a redundant word.
Spell Bound is not the core illness, but it is symptomatic. That’s why this review is very, very long. Think of this as a treatise for English-language LGBT romance writers the world over.
When I review anything I strongly believe in acknowledging what it aims to achieve with itself and its choices, and then assessing whether or not that was achieved. So let's use that as a framing device:
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How Spell Bound by F.T. Lukens fails...
1. ...as a fantasy novel.
The good news is that as a writer of fiction you get to create your world from scratch. The bad news is that because you create your world from scratch, everything in it is a conscious choice, and the reader will assume that there is some reason behind these choices.
The appeal of fantasy, more than any other genre, is imagination.
It’s not that Spell Bound lacks imagination. It has enough to come up with the beginnings of an idea. It does not have the effort to ideate any more.
A. The Magic System
The base of Spell Bound’s magic system is actually pretty neat. Spells need energy to be cast and maintained. This energy doesn’t come from within the sorcerer, but from ley lines which vary in strength, and can even die off. Each person senses magic differently, and deeply personally. Some sorcerers have unique abilities--one character is a double-AA for magical energy; another can switch to thermographic magical energy camera view. Those who are gifted at wielding the ley line undergo apprenticeships to learn magic and eventually enter the lucrative trade of spell-casting floating chandeliers in McMansions.
There’s a magical council--the Consortium--that governs the practice of magic. If you fuck up, they can take away your sense of and ability to wield the leyline. This is described as a death of the soul; tantamount to if not worse than outright execution.
Our book centres around curse-breaking. This is where the “most powerful sorcerer in an age” (p.7; 259; 266) Antonia Hex works, and the area our protagonists Rook and Sun are both apprenticing in.
Having read that, you’re probably interested in what other functions there are of the magical system. I was.
Sun is said (everything in this book is told to you) to be a talented apprentice. When Rook gets in a life-or-death situation, Sun...grabs a nearby object and cuts him free.
A foot chase scene? Apart from a few magical blasts which could be gunshots for all they differ, in this world a foot chase is just a foot chase.
B. Spire City
The setting of Spell Bound is Spire City, where sell-out sorcerers charge big bucks to levitate chandeliers; 80s stranger danger caricatures hang around back alleys giving out dodgy spells; sick fucks hex, curse, and jinx people; and exactly two (2) agencies exist devoted to dealing with the result of said dodgy and malignant spells.
Already there’s a colourful fork ahead of us with regards to how we could develop the setting. That’s why Lukens has chosen to make the majority of the scenes in Spell Bound set at a receptionist’s desk that is unremarkable except for precisely two magical objects which serve zero function to the plot. Sometimes the characters leave the office, and you get a glimpse of a setting that would be really, really cool to spend many a chapter in. But then it’s over, and we’re back doing coffee runs and answering the phone. The haunted house on the cover is almost comically irrelevant and as flavourful as white bread.
Lukens could have imagined anything for Spire City. Anything. They could have let their imagination run free, planted the fertile plains with crops full of thematic symbolism and rule of cool.
So tell me, Lukens, I beg, why is it that when you imagined a mythical city where people define entire careers around both entrepreneurial and bureaucratic magic...tell me, when you could have imagined anything, you came up with a city where HOAs exist? Why is every character dressed like it’s 2014? Why can I not say what a single building looks like?
The biggest sin of Spire City is that Lukens cannot fathom a place that is not the United States of America, and thinks we are all on the same page, and okay with that.
2. ...as a young adult novel.
On how to write prose badly:
One thing Goodreads reviews do mention is this book is not at a Young Adult level. The language and theme complexity and the character behaviour of the two leads are more suited to the Middle Grade range.
I agree, somewhat. To illustrate, I’m going to give some comparisons. Here is a selection of writing from Maggie Stiefvater’s The Dream Thieves, the second book in the YA The Raven Cycle series, compared with Spell Bound’s approximate equivalent. The thing that really stands out to me here is Spell Bound's use of clichés without expanding on them. There's a lack of the detail and specificity needed to make prose and character come alive.
*my Kindle eBook for TDT would not give me the pages, so I’ve cited chapters
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The inside of the old Camaro smelled like asphalt and desire, gasoline and dreams. Ronan sat behind the wheel, eyes on the midnight street. Streetlights fenced the asphalt, slashing reflections over the atomic orange hood. On either side of the road, the barren lots of car dealerships sprawled, eerie and silent.
He was as hungry as the night.
The Dream Thieves, Chapter 34
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And now Adam felt it in his hands. He felt it in his spine. He could see it mapped in his brain. The ley line traveled beneath him, waves of energy, but it detoured here, snagged and conducted through the water, traveling upward to the surface. It was only a small stream, only a small crack in the bedrock, so this was only a small leak.
The Dream Thieves, Chapter 55
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If the bad pun wasn’t indication enough that this was Antonia’s office, the massive amount of magical power rolling off it was. It buzzed under my skin. I blinked, and my vision went black-and-white save for the thick red ley line that ran right through the building. It thumped like a heartbeat. I blinked again, and the world went back into color and the line disappeared.
Spell Bound, p. 30
The writing isn’t at Young Adult level. However, it's not Middle Grade either. Kids are smart, and when we write simplistically because we think it’s what they need, we let them down. The problem with Spell Bound’s prose isn’t that it is miscategorised. The problem is that it is bad.
Two Middle Grade books I absolutely loved as a child were The Invisible Girl (2007) by Laura Ruby and The Neverending Story (1983) by Michael Ende. The openings of each book are provided below, as well as the opening of Spell Bound.
In a vast and sparkling city, a city at the centre of the universe, one little man remembered something big.
He was very old, this little man, his full name forgotten over the years. He called himself The Professor. His specialities were numerous and included psychology, criminology, mathematics, history, aerodynamics, zoology and gardening. He also collected beer cans.
Other than the delivery boy who left his groceries at the back door, The Professor hadn’t seen anyone in at least ten years. It was just as well, since a hair-growing experiment had left him with a head full of long green grass. Also, he didn’t like clothing, so he wore ladies’ snap-front housedresses and rubber flip-flops with white socks. He spent much of his time fiddling in his workshop, feeding the many kittens that popped out of his pockets and looking things up on eBay.
The Invisible Girl, p.5-6
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The Neverending Story, p.1
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Hex-A-Gone.
The name didn’t quite inspire visions of magical greatness. It was a pun. A bad one but funnily apt for a local emergency on-call curse-breaker. And while I could appreciate the humor on a campy level, the name definitely was not what had drawn me there. I wasn’t cursed. I wasn’t hexed. I wasn’t in need of a magical service, but I stood outside the nondescript office front that had the name emblazoned in simple white letters across the glass door, and a ‘Consortium Sanctioned’ certificate tucked into the corner of the window.
A wilted potted plant leaned mournfully toward a sliver of sunlight on the other side, and beyond that, the lights were dimmed, making it difficult to see anything other than the reception area. The whole image was the epitome of depressed office park chic, down to the plain black welcome mat on the other side of the threshold, and not what one would expect from a magical business owned by the supposedly most powerful sorcerer in Spire City.
Spell Bound, p.1
In the opening for The Invisible Girl, we are introduced to The Professor, who is key to the entire plot. We are also introduced to the theme--in a vast, sparkling city, one person who doesn’t appear to mean much does something that means a whole lot; and that being alone has its charms but it’s not good in the long run. We are also introduced to the setting and tone--a man has given himself a lawn for a head through a kooky science experiment; he also shops on eBay.
In the opening for The Neverending Story, we are given a fun graphic to build our setting around. There is a little shop; we are inside it because the inscription on the door is backwards. It’s raining outside. Suddenly, a schoolboy rushes in, and he seems distracted. Our perspective shifts to his--he is taking in the setting. It’s a bookshop, and every crevice is crammed with tomes.
These openings waste absolutely no space. Every single thing is a frame for the rest of the narrative. There is a reason one of the biggest writing rules, though not stated in How Not to Write a Novel, is to make your opening your best work. You edit your first chapter to within an inch of its life, and then you edit it some more.
For Spell Bound, I’ve given the opening to you again, and strike-through’d anything that does not matter to the rest of the book.
This isn't up to the standard of YA; it’s also not MG. It’s just bad.
3. ...as a romance novel.
A. Tropes
Romance readers are an inverse of fanfic readers. Fanfic readers read the same characters with a bunch of different tropes; romance readers read the same tropes with a bunch of different characters. So let’s take a look at the two main romance tropes readers were promised:
Rivals to lovers. Rook and Sun are not rivals. You are told they are rivals. They are not. If you discard the lines calling them ‘rivals’, ‘frenemies’ and so on, and instead look at what’s actually being portrayed, Rook and Sun are professional colleagues in the same field who become friends through work.
Grumpy x Sunshine. Grumpy isn’t grumpy, they just constantly have their boundaries broken and people informing them they’re grumpy for not enjoying having said boundaries broken. Sunshine isn’t sunshine, he’s just kind of normal. Basically every other character is insane except these two.
B. The Burn
When Sun gets to what is essentially the ‘This is why I’m in love with him,’ part of the book, all I could think was that Sun wasn’t describing the virtues of a lover–Sun was describing the virtue of a bare minimum decent friend.
4. ...as a comfortable, easy read.
A. Show, don't tell
On writing internal monologue:
I’ve already outlined the way Rook and Sun’s mutual attraction is never described, just told to us. But it extends out further. We are told, over and over again, that Sun is a talented apprentice. But we don’t get to see Sun’s skill. We are told the Hex-A-Gone office is “depressed office park chic,” but never given anything explicit to describe the setting of a large part of the book.
This little quote here is a great encapsulation of how every single thing is relayed to the reader in Spell Bound:
My breath caught in my chest. Antonia saw herself in me? Is that why she let me stay? Is that why she hadn’t tossed me out when she discovered the Spell Binder? Oh wow. Antonia had a heart, a soft side, a squishy interior hidden deep beneath her tough-as-nails and indifferent exterior.
Spell Bound, p.138
But when things are described, it’s often either clumsy:
It was like the pictures of meteorite landings I’d seen in books, where the places closest to impact were completely flattened but the destruction radiated for miles.
Spell Bound, p.184
Her intense eyes bored into me, and I squirmed like an ant beneath a magnifying glass.
Spell Bound, p.138
Antonia went as quiet as a predator stalking its prey. Me. I was the prey. My heart raced like a rabbit’s.
Spell Bound, p.163
Or an extremely trite simile:
I deflated like a sad balloon.
Spell Bound, p.45
“What?” she asked, sharp like a knife.
Spell Bound, p.162
The rack’s shoulders drooped, and it turned away from her like a scolded puppy.
Spell Bound, p.5
This all makes the prose of Spell Bound read very much like a first or second draft. It’s fine; it’s workable. But these sorts of things shouldn’t be littered all over the place like they are. Decent prose needs creativity and specificity of simile and metaphor. It builds the internality of the character’s world; builds the theme; builds the voice and the immersion.
I began this long review by mentioning that I know Lukens knows how to write a decent story. This is because the shape of a decent plot is here, but also because there are points in the prose where actual skill comes through:
The blast of magic that followed rocked the very cornerstones of the building. The floor buckled under my body, cracking and groaning, the reverberations of it shaking my very bones. The whole room shook, like an earthquake. Plaster rained down from where the ceiling cracked. Furniture toppled over. Wood splintered. Stone shattered. Everyone around me fell. The sound of bodies thudding to the floor was ominous and weird, as if they all fell at once, like puppets with their strings cut.
Spell Bound, p.5
The modulation of rhythm and sentence complexity in this paragraph is effective. The imagery is simple, but it’s simple in a deliberate way; a sort of modulation that helps lead up to that final sentence, which gives a striking, and unique piece of imagery through simile–a simile that builds upon the theme of what the Consortium is, thus producing a subtle symbolic metaphor.
So, Lukens…what happened? Where is this skill the rest of the book?
B. Edits needed
There were several little bits here and there that made me suspect this book had not been through a proper edit. Like these paragraph breaks here, where the internal monologue doesn’t quite connect properly:
I took off my glove and touched one of the red, swollen marks on his arm, and my fingertips froze.
That was a powerful curse. Stronger than the journal. Stronger than the phone.
Dizzy with relief, I rested my forehead on his collarbone and squeezed my eyes shut.
Spell Bound, p.121
Or this extremely clunky bit of dialogue:
“Do you know that movie, the one with the evil sorcerer who tries to take over the land? She’s beautiful and terrible and succeeds for a time, plunging the world into darkness? Have you ever wondered who she is based on? How the producers developed that plot? Why it might feel slightly familiar when you watched it?”
Spell Bound, p.163
Or this one:
“I wanted to decide for myself. I don’t take the words of those in power as absolute, especially when they are notorious for being secretive and known for their oppressive tactics.”
Spell Bound, p.232
When Rook remarks in his internal monologue, despite having only known Antonia for a few weeks:
I felt strangely unmoored. And the realization that I didn’t really know Antonia at all was like a whack to the face. I didn’t like it.
Spell Bound, p.71
And this extremely bizarre exchange:
“And you are?” he prodded. “When Antonia inevitably asks who brought the creepy doll by, what do I say? I could say ‘that person who works for Fable,’ but that’s a little long.”
“They,” I said softly. “When you refer to me later, use ‘they.’ ”
Or the decision to have an extremely meanspirited potshot at actress Evanna Lynch--our villain in Spell Bound is a stuck-up rule-enforcer called Evanna Lynne Beech. I don’t need to say any more than that. It is targeted, cruel, misogynist, and above all inexplicable. Evanna Lynch really has not been in the public spotlight for a long time, but the vitriol with which Lukens writes Evanna Lynne Beech is impossible to ignore, and it is uncomfortable. It feels like Lukens is stirring the pot for no reason. It looks unprofessional, and reflects badly on Lukens and the publisher.
But what cemented my belief that this was not properly edited were two points. First, Chapters 7 and 8, where the exact same event is repeated right next to each other, which is infuriating.
And second--the reveal of the fact that Antonia cannot have another apprentice, and the reason why. These are revealed to Rook at a good spot in the plot. But it isn’t revealed to the reader at that point. It is revealed to the reader nearly immediately, through Sun’s perspective chapters. This makes the mystery flat and Rook’s lack of knowledge about it extremely aggravating to read, because all Lukens had to do was edit a few sentences here and there to make them a touch less direct.
5. ...as a diverse novel.
Let’s discuss Spell Bound’s praises for diversity being a tad overgiven.
I want to preface with a bit of a soapbox rant. Please, bear with me. I want you to understand why I’m bringing this up at all.
Standards for LGBT and diverse works are bad. Diverse romance is rather newly a thing publishers will touch, let alone big publishers. Because it still feels new, readers have a lower bar for quality. This is my theory for why this book has received such generous reviews.
I say ‘feels’ and ‘rather’ new, because in actuality, we’ve moved past that point. We’re not at the starting line anymore. It’s been a decade, at least.
We have options now. Options means we get to choose. We no longer have to approve and buy anything that remotely features minority characters regardless of quality.
Basically--go into this remembering we don’t have to put up with this anymore!
Warmed up? Let’s go.
A. Sun
Sun is Korean. The word ‘Korean’ or ‘Korea’ is never stated, neither is ‘Asia’ or ‘Asian’. If you didn’t learn the very Korean names of Sun and their sister, you would not have been able to tell they are supposed to be Korean.
There’s no depth to Sun’s Korean-ness, and this is both disappointing re: representation, and a huge missed opportunity. Sun is sixteen years old, living and working with a white wizard away from their Korean home for the first time in their life. Sun could have mentioned missing home-cooked Korean food; hearing people speaking Korean around them, etc. The book’s theme is that being apart from your community hollows your soul.
Oh, also Sun is the only explicitly non-white (main) character.
I also noted that Sun, the East Asian (Korean), non-binary character is repeatedly infantilised. They do a lot of sweater paws. They have a “cute nose” (p.67, p.100, p.110, p.148, p.165, p.278, p.297). Their stylistic voice recalls a preteen girl–in their internal commentary, things “sucked so much” (p.28). In a particularly Disney movie girl protagonist moment, Sun’s internal commentary on page 34:
Ugh. I was going to die. I was going to die in front of this guy, because of this guy, and oh my god it was going to be much more embarrassing than nailing my chin on the floor.
It’s not an egregious violation, no. But it’s certainly uncomfortable.
B. On the humble fujoshi
Point 1: The concept of ‘female’ and ‘male’ voice lacks creativity and has problems. However, we don’t live in the magical Wittig-style post-gender utopia, so there is a spectrum of voice that a writer must consider; one that does go from ‘feminine’ to ‘masculine’. You should especially consider this when you choose to write in the first person.
An example to explain: when the voice is reacting to an event. At the more feminine end of the spectrum the internal monologue is emotional and empathetic. At the more masculine end, it is reasoning with what they’re going to do. Too much of the feminine and it descends into constant hysterics; too much of the masculine and you get a creature of debatable sentience. Both are blank walls of characters. Rook should fall somewhere on the masculine side, and Sun in the centre, perhaps very slightly to the masculine. They do not, either of them.
Point 2: There are dynamics of heterosexuality (for those unacquainted with feminist literature, what I mean is ‘heterosexual normativity’) that people who are not they themselves same-sex attracted have a tendency to reproduce when they write same-sex couples.
One thinks of the humble fujoshi.
The fujoshi, in this discussion, is not attracted to the same sex. They write romances between two men for reasons which are far too Twitter spat inducing to get into here, but the end result is the depiction of a relationship between two men where the question, “So who’s the man and who’s the woman?” doesn’t induce a scoff but a dawning realisation.
This fujoshi–the kind who cares who is seme and who is uke (or even knows what those are)–is a dying breed. Nevertheless there are elements of them vestigial. They were hugely influential to the last twenty years of slash fanfiction. In turn, the last twenty years of slash fanfiction have been extremely influential on what is currently being written and published in the romance genre and especially the LGBT romance genre. If you have read any slash fanfic posted in the last decade, you will recognise F.T. Lukens has at the very least read a bit of it. Archive of our Own has an unofficial house style, and Spell Bound oozes it.
So, let’s tie our two disparate seme and uke points together in toxic harmony. Lukens’ style is heavily influenced by slash fanfic, which, due to its roots in the fujoshi sasunaru trenches, has a tendency to create works where characters’ internal monologues are noticeably feminine in voice. Why? Because it is influenced by works written overwhelmingly by and for women; with a vested interest in making one of the characters the ‘woman’ of the relationship. In this, there must always be heterogeneity in the couple: one must be The Feminine, one must be The Masculine. They are not feminine men and masculine men, they are the woman and the man.
This voice issue isn’t obnoxiously present in Spell Bound. But it’s there, and it’s difficult to ignore. Lukens has two first-person perspectives in this book–Rook’s, and Sun’s–and both of them are barely indistinguishable not just from each other, but from a Naruto fanfic from 2011.
Truthfully, I don’t actually care whether people writing this way oppresses gay men or if it’s just annoying. What I do care about is that it’s bad writing, because it’s hard to believe a character is a 16 year old boy/nonbinary when the voice he/they are written in is that of a 12 year old girl.
Let me now demonstrate Spell Bound’s heteronormativity via Lukens’ use of descriptors.
Rook is given the descriptors assigned to men in straight romances. He is “handsome” (p.179); he is taller than Sun (p.120); he will “walk with swagger” (p.252). Sun, meanwhile, is assigned the role of the woman–they are “pretty” (p.122), “cute” (over twenty times, no joke; I’ll use p.150), “adorable” (p.100), “beautiful” (p.302).
There’s no problem using these descriptors. The problem is those ‘masculine’ descriptors are never used on Sun, and the ‘feminine’ descriptors are never used on Rook. Combine that with an infantilising issue on Sun, and it could just be a garden variety straight romance.
This book frequently feels less like a genuine shot at representation-driven gay romance, and more like the writings of someone still stuck in the LiveJournal days of M/M fanfiction. No problem with that, except 1) you’re charging money for it, and 2) it should not be taken as representation.
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Antonia Hex
Antonia Hex is the most powerful sorceress of her age. She could charge into the Consortium, threaten them, and get her way. It would be quite easy for her. She easily breaks a hex without crashing the floating chandelier. She takes on Rook as her illegal apprentice because she wants to see if she can do the impossible and teach a non-magical person magic.
The climax of the book is Hex saving Rook and Sun from her previous apprentice’s fate, standing up for herself and the apprentices, and then, after enacting her revenge (threatening the Consortium and getting her way), returning peacefully back to curse-breaking by her own free will--the profession she was initially constrained to.
Antonia Hex’s story churns in the background, and it utterly fascinates. This is a woman processing grief, responsibility, and power. This is a woman who is fiercely rebellious but full of regrets.
She, somehow, despite the limitless potential in her base conception alone, falls flat. She was cursed from the beginning, of course–she was an interesting female character in a gay slash fic.
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Is This Where We're At?
78% of Goodreads reviews rated this at least four stars. Apparently, Spell Bound is a pretty decent contribution to LGBT fantasy romance. If this is the case, Spell Bound is a goddamn civil rights issue.
We accept the love we think we deserve. And I think we deserve better standards.
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