I thought the premise of The Marriage Spell was really promising - roughly Harry Potter Regency Romance, with the twist that magic is frowned upon by elite English society - and Putney can be a really fantastic writer. But this book didn't work for me on pretty much any level.

Putney makes the easiest and biggest mistake authors run into when they write magic into their books - it diffuses all the conflict & drains any and all tension from the novel. Has a character been ensorcelled? Well, just remove the spell! Is somebody injured? Heal him/her! Does somebody seem to be mean or unkind? Probably evil magic at work! Is something unknown or mysterious? Magic will tell you the answer to any difficult question! And quickly, too.

Nothing is hard. Nothing is challenging. As soon as a problem appears on the horizon, it is solved. Sometimes it's not instantaneous, but the danger disappears awfully fast.

The relationships between the characters work really similarly, which is even more mysterious since Putney can do such a good job building relationships. But it takes Jack about 3 pages to go from being resentful about being forced into marriage to being really content about it. It takes Jack's sister about 3 pages to go from being suspicious of Abby to being her new best friend.

So although the plot works - something happens, spurring another event, spurring another one - there's never any momentum or anxiety to it.

Add to that that the writing was really, really flat - here's a typical paragraph:

"He half expected Abby to gently say that he was being irrational, probably because he was jealous of his mother's attention, but instead she said seriously, "If your instinct says Scranton is a bad man, you're probably right. Your nature is too generous to be suspicious when there is no cause."

There's nothing actually *wrong* with that paragraph. It flows, it makes sense, the characters are expressing rational sentiments in line with their personalities. But it gives everything away. You don't have to wonder why Jack might be irrational, why Abby might tell him so, whether or not Jack has good instincts, how he came by them...it's just all laid out. There's nothing that makes you imagine or wonder.

I also had a poor sense of physicality throughout - Abby is apparently a big, curvacious woman and Jack is a strapping brute of a man, but I never felt it - I didn't doubt that it was true, but they weren't palpable characters to me.

I was disappointed. With such a good author, and such a good idea, it's a shame that the book turned out so badly. ( )

This book was so bad that I’m on my third time reading it….or listening to it as the case may be. I love romance novels. Who doesn’t? They’re adult fairy tales. I picked this one up years ago and gave it a listen and couldn’t stop. I dragged my CD players around with me, not to find out how it ended, because come on, it’s a romance novel, but because it was so unintentionally funny that I didn’t want to miss a bit of it.



The story takes place in regency era England and concerns a woman with healing powers named Abby who is in love from afar with Jack Langdon. He is injured in a hunting accident and nearly dies before she performs a “healing circle” with other people of wizardly powers and heals him. Her price for this is marriage. The added piece to this is that Jack also has powers and he hates wizards. As the story unfolds predictably Jack learns to accept Abby and her powers and his as well as he battles (I LOVE THIS PART) his evil stepfather.



The dialogue is ridiculous and the plot twists are enhanced with Abby using her powers to heal everybody in sight. Enhancing this mix are the vocals by Simon Prebble who puts an overwrought emphasis on such literary masterpieces as “I’m going to make love to you until all your bodily energy is restored”. I can’t even type that line without giggling.



I heartily recommend this book to anyone who finds bad dialogue and an overwrought reading style funny or who just loves grown up fairy tales. ( )

Not my fav, but a nice enjoyable story for reading on the beach. The passages that dealt with magic were a little hokey in my opinion, but I have never much enjoyed the historical romances that incorporate the paranormal. Good characters, fast moving storyline, not a bad way to spend an afternoon ( )

Jack Langdon, Lord Frayne, is hunting with his friends when his horse stumbles and he is thrown. Severely injured he is taken to the home of a healer. The female wizard Abby Stanton, great healer of the region, conducts a healing circle repairing Lord Frayne's broken neck saving his life. But the payment that had been arranged was marriage.

Abby offers to release Jack from the promise, but being a man of honor, Jack maintains that he will wed her. Their romance is amusing and filled with the discovery of Jack's magical aspects. Though the Ton is not enamored of wizards, with Jack's and his sister's sponsorship, Abby is accepted into society.

This was my first book by Mary Jo Putney but I will definitely look for more. ( )

This was a great blend of magic and regency which Putney had to discontinue due to a change in publisher. She dropped the fantasy aspects and wrote the rest of the series, the Lost Lords, straight. Pity, because this was a promising beginning and I liked the magical elements... ( )