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A review by mafiabadgers
Under Your Spell by Laura Wood
3.0
First read 03/2025
I recently attended a literary pub quiz with some people from my book club. We won a handful of books, including this one. Nobody wanted it, being too busy fighting over the dinosaur lift-the-flap book. Since I had to run for my train, I grabbed it and disappeared into the night, swearing revenge.
I annotated it extensively so that I can more effectively force it on others in the club. The dedication declares that it's "For the six-books-a-week, just-one-more-page, trope-loving, library-card-owning, smutty-audio-book-in-public-listening, HEA-chasing dreamers. This is a love letter." Since it's 450 pages long, this did not suggest that it was written to stand up to close scrutiny. It didn't, but pulling it apart was half the fun.
It had very similar issues to Alexis Hall's Boyfriend Material, in that it's enamoured of the excessively-exercised, hyper-maintained male body, so while it's aware that such a body requires a physical and mental cost, its critique is fairly perfunctory and never willing to let it go.
Under Your Spell deals with fame the same way: for all its criticism of it, it ends with the couple voluntarily making the personal public, thereby shoring up the values of a surveillance society that positions publicity as sincerity. When it comes to romance and celebrity, that one Check, Please! fanfiction has yet to be knocked off its pedestal.
For all that it's badly written and poorly thought out, it was pretty good fun, and I struggled to put it down, so if you're likewise susceptible to zingy romance you should enjoy it.
I recently attended a literary pub quiz with some people from my book club. We won a handful of books, including this one. Nobody wanted it, being too busy fighting over the dinosaur lift-the-flap book. Since I had to run for my train, I grabbed it and disappeared into the night, swearing revenge.
I annotated it extensively so that I can more effectively force it on others in the club. The dedication declares that it's "For the six-books-a-week, just-one-more-page, trope-loving, library-card-owning, smutty-audio-book-in-public-listening, HEA-chasing dreamers. This is a love letter." Since it's 450 pages long, this did not suggest that it was written to stand up to close scrutiny. It didn't, but pulling it apart was half the fun.
It had very similar issues to Alexis Hall's Boyfriend Material, in that it's enamoured of the excessively-exercised, hyper-maintained male body, so while it's aware that such a body requires a physical and mental cost, its critique is fairly perfunctory and never willing to let it go.
Under Your Spell deals with fame the same way: for all its criticism of it, it ends with the couple voluntarily making the personal public, thereby shoring up the values of a surveillance society that positions publicity as sincerity. When it comes to romance and celebrity, that one Check, Please! fanfiction has yet to be knocked off its pedestal.
For all that it's badly written and poorly thought out, it was pretty good fun, and I struggled to put it down, so if you're likewise susceptible to zingy romance you should enjoy it.