I suppose I should preface this review with a caveat: I am not the target audience. I am not a teenager (though I have high school year book pictures to prove I once was), and I have the romantic sense of a rabid ferret. While I have never before wittingly read a romance novel (don’t get me wrong, I am not above them, it’s just that we rabid ferrets don’t understand literary romance), I have read a fair number of young adult fantasy novels in my time.

The above clarification is important because Spellbound by Cara Lynn Shultz is, first and foremost, a young adult romance novel. Fortunately, no bodices got ripped, but Spellbound still manages to be everything that I expected a teen romance novel to be. Essentially, the novel tells the story of Emma Connor who moves to New York, begins attending the prestigious Vincent Academy and develops a wild infatuation with the school bad boy, Brendan Salinger. Oh, and then Emma discovers that she and Brendan are reincarnated souls destined to be together if they can only avoid a pesky curse. I am not sure how many times I headdesked.

The litany of characters reads like an order placed through a catalogue of tropes: the token bad boy, the token mean girl, the token bully, the token nice boy, the token Latino (who also doubles as the token homosexual), the token witch. As I read the book, I wanted the supporting characters to deepen, to show more of themselves, to remove the masks placed on them by the author. They didn’t. Each character stepped out onto the stage and gave his lines like a good li’l actor and then shuffled off stage left for his next appearance.

Even the protagonist, Emma, is the token girl-who-thinks-she-is-totally-unworthy-but-is-truly-Special ™. How Special™? Almost before we find out anything else about her, we find out that she is starting a new school because her stepfather nearly killed her in a drunk driving accident and the stigma was too much for her to stay where she was. But there is more. On page 6 we are treated to Emma’s life in a nutshell: Her father left her at age six, her twin brother died at fourteen, her mother died at fifteen and now she lives with her aunt and has no friends but her cousin. Look, I am not a hard-hearted person and I know that there are real people with real lives that become consumed by terrible tragedies, but honestly? This soon in a novel, I am sensing some serious Mary Sue symptoms. What we have here is the cheap-shot, sucker-punch blow to the emotions; you feel like a bad human if you don’t immediately sympathize with a person who has had so much loss at a young age, and that allows the author to avoid writing a character who is likable on her own merits.

The second sign of Emma being Special™ is that the bad boy with “rock-star eyes” who does not find any of the other girls at school interesting, is immediately drawn to Emma. Every girl wants Brendan Salinger (who is also from an über-rich family and plays on the basketball team), but only Emma is unique enough for his interests. While I am on the topic of Brendan, I would like to take a moment and admit that I know this is a romance novel, but frankly, Brendan is a creeper. He is too smooth and too confident in his relationship with Emma. He is supposed to be decent guy because when he and Emma go out with friends one evening and they all drink, Brendan does not get drunk. He does this for Emma. Aww, how sweet. Except that it sounds like he is an alcoholic who is hiding his addiction in order to make a good impression. Oh, and he has a reputation for being anti-social and for fighting. Yeah, I hope I have a daughter who brings home a stand-up sorta guy like Brendan.

So I endured pages of description about Brendan the “hot mess”, I endured pages of characters who did not achieve their literary potential, I even endured the requisite reading of a love-charged Shakespeare poem aloud in English class. I endured watching Brendan demonstrate his “love” for Emma by spending money and complimenting her not on her strength of character or her brains or her determination, but only on her looks.

What I cannot endure is an author who does not demonstrate that she has done her research. When the story finally reaches the fantastical elements, the author weaves a back story set in medieval Europe. Central to the story is a pendant that Emma wears with a design which the author consistently refers to as a family crest. It is a cool design, but it is not a crest. In heraldry, the crest is the design atop the helm which then sits upon the shield. This seems trite, but this armorial symbol is the crux of the book and even a “medieval text” that Emma reads refers to the symbol as a crest. Shultz need not be a herald in order to use the proper term; a thirty second Wikipedia search could probably have explained this. Likewise, the author’s brief depiction of medieval society caused a vigorous facepalm. We live in the Information Age, there is no excuse for writing a book filled with maudlin bits of knowledge that might have been gleaned from a sixth-grade history textbook circa 1950.

Headdesk #327: There is poetry in pseudo-archaic English. I wish I were joking. On page 129, we encounter a poem which includes the lines: “And whence each other they have found/Death comes after their destined embrace.” “Whence” is not an archaic form of “when”, it means “from where” or “from what place”. Or maybe the author knows this, still means “from where” and the poem is not meant to make sense. I will grant that is possible.

In the end, I think what bothered me most is that I wanted to like Emma. Shultz does insert flashes of real humanness into her protagonist and I kept hoping that Emma would rise above her stereotypic role and become her own person. Unfortunately, every time she begins to rise, the story pushes her back into her “proper” place. In a gutsy move, Emma stands up to the bully, Anthony Caruso, and I was pleased to see her show that sort of character. Suddenly, a wild Brendan appears and the scene is no longer about Emma showing strength of character, but about Brendan showing his awesomeness.

I wanted Emma to find closure and happiness within herself. I wanted her to face the demons of her past and emerge triumphant; but all those demons just serve as a catalyst to press her closer into a relationship that screams, “Unhealthy!” She does not come to grips with her mother’s death or her stepfather nearly killing her. Her father’s abandonment is just another of Shultz’s emotional tools, so Emma does not face that, either. Emma remains a static character, and that, more than anything, is what bothers me about this book and there is not enough brain bleach to scour it from my mind.

   -- Katie Hager