There just aren't words for how teeth-grindingly awful the Irish theme is. The worst of all the terrible things about Spellbinder is definitely the cheesy romantic Irish-American bits. And in spite of the cliches and use of ethnic stereotypes where characterization should be, I believed in and cared about the characters. It was the same with Spellbinder I just couldn't put it down, even though there is such a lot wrong with it.

I almost missed watching dolphins once because I was so engrossed in something of hers. One thing Rawn can do like almost no other author I've ever read is keep me utterly hooked, even while I'm aware that the plot is ludicrous and the over the top romance is way beyond merely soppy. There were some points where I was almost convinced I was reading a parody, but mostly it seems to take itself deadly seriously. Like, stereotypical romance novels make the heroine really wet and the hero a brute, so we need a strong! feisty! heroine and a macho – yet sensitive! hero. It is packed full with the the sort of secondary cliches that seem to come from reaction against the most hackneyed cliches of the genre. So, Spellbinder is a kind of paranormal romance. Except that Rawn is not a struggling rookie writer, she's a well respected fantasy author. This sort of explains why the book feels like the product of some struggling, moderately talented writer trying to get SF published, who gets frustrated at formulaic romance novels and decides, hey, I can do better than that. I don't want to make jokes about the brain eater getting Rawn, because that's almost literally true: according to the author's note, she wrote it as a way to fight back against depression, and hoped that writing something utterly different from her fantasy stuff would help with getting back into writing again. But it also has a lot of utterly sporktastic elements.

Oh good gracious, this book! It's not even unremittingly dire, it has its moments. How it came into my hands: Bought new on Amazon, based purely on my enthusiasm for Rawn. Reasons for reading it: I love Melanie Rawn, and she's keeping everyone on tenterhooks waiting for the third of her really amazing Exiles trilogy, so I was happy to read a new standalone by her while I'm waiting for that. Verdict: Spellbinder is a bizarre mixture of eye-bleedingly bad with quite decent.

Captal's Tower by Melanie Rawn