Review: SPELLBOUND: THE WORKINGS OF DRUG TECH by Marcel V. Sahade

Jake was a high school kid, who, one day, finds a book—The Book of Spells.” Inside were spells on things like “How to run like a Cheetah” and “How to breath underwater.” In this instance, the plot becomes interesting as you read through it; however, certain areas lagged a little with repetition and excessive detail. There were certain details we could’ve done without to quicken the pace. For example, we didn’t really need to know what was in every picture of the book.

Jennifer was a law student, an apprentice of a barrister that can “read face,” a special deduction ability to know what one is thinking or feeling.

Charlie was a lab technician working at Drug Tech that found a cure for cancer.

Overall, this was relatively easy to read. I was interested to find out how the initial characters would come together in the plot. But then, as I started getting deeper into the book, I realized how many more characters came up. There was a law student, a high school kid, a biochemist, an astronaut, a captain, a prisoner, a fortune teller, and so on. There were like 20 different characters, making it hard to keep track. Although some were interesting, it was still way too many characters. This could’ve been narrowed down to a select few to make it simpler. At this point, this seemed to have several stories. We had an invisible boy, a lost treasure, a possible vampire. The way Robert’s story turned out was wonderfully ironic. Thinking he had killed his cheating girlfriend, he becomes shocked to learn that it was her twin sister instead. That was a good one. But what would these different stories come to reveal? A conspiracy at Drug Tech? And what did it have to do with the lost treasure?

The stories didn’t really coalesce together; one didn’t link to another. And the characters often didn’t show up again. For example, the first chapter started off with Jake and then he just disappeared. The updated cover is an improvement to the monochromatic image of a lab against white text, which didn’t make the title stand out too much. The writing was okay, but I didn’t think it was strong in telling the story the way it was meant to. This either should’ve been more simplified or it would’ve been better off as a collection of unconventional short stories.

My rating: 3 stars