Book review: Spells by Aprilynne Pike

Book Review: Spells, by Aprilynne Pike

Book Description from School Library Journal: Gr 7-10–This sequel to Wings (HarperTeen, 2009) begins with Laurel going to the Academy of Avalon to begin a summer of intensive training as a Fall faerie in order to protect her family from the threat of her troll nemesis, Jeremiah Barnes. The strict faerie social hierarchy begins to wear on her, causing her to question her place in that society. When she goes back to her life in the human world, she constantly feels the strain of wondering when Barnes will make his next move. Her relationship with David, her human boyfriend, has deepened, but she still feels ties to Tamani, her faerie sentry, and she constantly questions where she belongs. In the end, she is forced to choose between her two worlds. --Necia Blundy, Marlborough Public Library, MA

The Review:

Note: When I was in the middle of Spells--sequel to Wings, I stumbled upon the translated version of the book, therefore I jumped to read the translated version instead to save time.

By the way, the publisher of the translated version of Pike's series somehow decided to rename the series as "The Calling of the Flowery Wings Series", I suspect they think this new title would make the series sound grander. But oh my! That's so silly, I'd have felt very sorry for Pike if her books aren't so dull.

Also the publisher came up with the brilliant idea of relating Spells with Harry Potter (just because both books have a magical Academy in the stories) and Avatar (simply because both have a World Tree in their stories). Obviously the publisher wants to sell the series as 'Harry Potter plus Avatar with the romance thrown in', it might be a good trick to attract lady readers, but sadly it fails to do Harry Potter and Avatar justice.

While I was reading Spells, I also stumbled upon Switched, a YA paranormal novel by Amanda Hocking, which shares some basic elements with Aprilynne Pike's Wings series; I found Switched to be poorly written, maybe the comparison between Switched and Spells makes me become more forgiving to the latter.

Taking the female lead Laurel as an example, I'm glad that she was showing some character growth and personality in Spells instead of staying the same as her perfect Mary Sue self (though I'm not saying she'd grown out of it entirely); her interactions with her parents are also finely written. And for once I can actually see her actually having to practice and study in order to catch up with her fellow students instead of her mastering one skill after another, making one achievement after another so effortlessly and unrealistically.

We also see more sides of the other characters such as David and Tamani, we know more about what they feel about different matters, we learn more of their backstories. Although it still doesn't make them outstanding or interesting as characters, at least it saves them both from remaining as featureless cardboard cutout Love Interests.

However, Spells is still lacking in many other aspects, for one thing Laurel's inability to commit to one lover still troubles me. Her behaviors and attitude toward Tamani annoys me to no end. When she visited Avalon, Tamani was always there for her, he offered nothing but kindness and affection to her, and he clearly wanted to be more than just friends. And Laurel, while taking whatever Tamani had to offer, remained annoyingly ambiguous about where she stood with Tamani instead of coming clean with him, and she even went so far as to kiss the boy on the cheek. Oh god! Unless kissing is part of the normal greeting in the faeries society, then Laurel's behavior is the perfect example of leading the guy on, giving him hope only to shoot him down in the end. That is pretty irresponsible. Eventually Shar, Tamani's boss and mentor, scolded Laurel for taking Tamani for granted while going out with her human boy (David). Well Laurel, Shar's words serves you just right, you deserve every single one of them.
   
It's explained that Tamani knew Laurel as a child before she was sent to the human world, and even since then Tamani devoted his life to protect Laurel and wait for her returning to Avalon so the two of them could be together again. But why!? Why would him invest so much of himself to wait on Laurel? What makes him think she's worthy of such devotion? We're never given any explanation, and what happened when both Tamani and Laurel were children is also never revealed, it makes Tamani's love look very much 'coming out of nowhere'.

At home, Laurel's mother had issues dealing with her daughter's true identity as a faerie, and Laurel went on ranting about her mother's avoiding her and so on. Oh goodness, would you just give the poor woman a break? I think Laurel's mother's reaction looks reasonable enough, normal people wouldn't just accept their adoptive daughter is from another species which they had never known existed before, like it's nothing. Human's mind just don't work that way! Just give your mother some space and time instead of feeling sorry for yourself, please!

Plus I still don't like how Pike twisted the sidhe myth, historical and/or mythical figures to fit her story. Though I'm aware of the fact that different cultures have their own different folklore and myths about faeries, still if Pike has the brilliance to involve Avalon and Camelot, King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, Oberon and Titania in her story, then I think she should pay some respect to the traditional myth about faeries..
I also read from Pike's Biography that 'She has been spinning stories since she was a child with a hyper-active imagination'. Sorry, man! There're a lot of words which would fit to be used on Aprilynne Pike-the author (most of them negative, to be frank), but 'an author with a hyperactive imagination' is the one description I would NOT use on her.


Instead of showing the strength of her rich imagination, Spells is an example of Pike's failure of unable to construct a believable, refreshing  world of its own. The fantasy world in Spells fails to stand on its own, historical and mythical figures were mentioned as being faeries, but these background informations are underdeveloped and they do little to richen the world of faeries.

Let's look at the world of fairies Pike had created: the society is divided into four classes ---'castes' would be the more suitable word I guess, since faeries are born into their ranks, Winter Faeries: the ruling class, also the most powerful faeries; Fall Faeries: scholars and creators of potions; Summer Faeries: entertainers, Spring Faeries: the bottom of the food chains, labors and soldiers whose purpose of life is to do their superiors' betting. The members of the lower rank must treat the higher ranks with utmost respect and obedience, and the members of  higher ranks can do as they please because they're more powerful than the lower ranks and they're considered more 'useful' to the society.

I don't know about you, but reading about this kind of caste system in a society makes me feel very sad.

We are told that young Fall faeries are sent to an academy to study (as to where Summer and Spring faeries got their education, I don't know), we are told that young faeries go to school just like young humans do, they also have classes, classrooms, dorms, assignments, projects and experiments to catch up with, there even is a cafeteria of a sort so the faeries had to sit down and eat together. Even though the Fall faeries are studying plants and their experiments sound a lot fancier than those we have in a human's highschool, still essentially it looks like Laurel was just moving from one highschool to another when she went from the human's world to Avalon. Oh, it's very imaginative indeed.

Why on earth would faeries learn their crafts almost the same ways like humans do? (a group of faeries sit around in a classroom, studying, listening to their teacher, hanging out their projects on time, it sounds very familiar, isn't it?) Why their education system still sounds so similar with humans'? What happens to the other alternative learning-manners? How about home-schooling, self-studying and apprenticeship?

In the Academy, every single Fall faeries knew who Laurel was. Yes, she was important and famous among her kind! That sounds very much like the same wish-fulfillment trapping that Twilight (in Bella's first day at Forks High, everyone noticed her and is nice to her) and even Harry Potter (Harry, the bullied and overlooked boy, found himself a famous and important person in the world of wizards) fall prey to.

Among the Fall faeries, there's one girl called Mara, who hated Laurel for no good reason and always gave her dirty looks, oh that reminds me so much of Twilight. And of course this mean girl wore low-cut outfit which showed off a lot of her flesh (so a girl who wears revealing clothes must be a bitch, very stereotyped indeed). I now start to wonder why do the author have such a grudge against women in low-cut dresses.

Then in about the last 50 pages of the book, the evil trolls resurfaced to stir things up! There're some action scenes but they're very forgettable. Once the trolls showed up, Pike went into great length to highlight how ugly, hideous and deformed those trolls were (the same-old, same-old pretty=good, ugly=evil trapping, again). Meanwhile, faeries are being described as beautiful and perfect like models, every single thing in Avalon is nice to look at, while humans are being described as flawed and nothing better than animals, trolls remain as the lowest of the lows. Oh god, it sounds very much like the setting of a Disney cartoon for primary school kids.

*plot spoiler warning*

The foreshadowing of supposed troll-hunter Klea as a baddio is a bit too obvious. When the evil troll Barnes from book 1 was about to be killed, he  stared at Klea in disbelief and gasped: "You? But--"  I can't think of any other worse dead-giveaway than this.

*end of plot spoiler*

The Final Words: I'm not amused by Spells, although some of the description about Avalon is cool but the story as a whole is uneventful and quite boring. The world-building is very much make-believe and it fails to bring anything new and interesting to the table. There's some depthening on the three main characters, but the relationship problem they are having is getting very old. As a whole, Spells isn't so very terrible but it's very dull and it leads us to nowhere. I strongly recommend you not to bother yourself with it.

You can also find my reviews on the other two books of the series, Wings and Illusions at the links below this review!