Series: Enchanted Inc. – Book 1
Author: Shanna Swendson
No of Pages: 308
Release Date: 31 May 2005
DON’T MESS WITH THE HEXES
Katie Chandler had always heard that New York is a weird and wonderful place, but this small-town Texas gal had no idea how weird until she moved there. Everywhere she goes, she sees something worth gawking at, and Katie is afraid she’s a little too normal to make a splash in the big city. Working for an ogre of a boss doesn’t help either.
Then, seemingly out of the blue, Katie gets a job offer form Magic, Spells and Illusions, Inc., a company that sells tricks of the trade to the magic community. For MSI, Katie’s ordinariness is an asset. Lacking any bit of magic, she can easily spot a fake spell, catch hidden clauses in competitor’s contracts, and detect magically disguised intruders. Suddenly, average Katie is very special indeed.
She quickly learns that office politics are even more complicated when your new boss is a real ogre, and you have a crush on the sexy, shy, ultra powerful head of the R&D department, who is so busy fighting an evil competitor threatening to sell black magic on the street that he seems barely to notice Katie. Now it’s up to Katie to pull off the impossible: save the world and – hopefully – live happily ever after.
My Thoughts:
Enchanted Inc. was a bit of a bore for me.
Katie has spent most of her working life at her parents feed shop. She did everything for the business there from the general running to the bookwork. Problem is, her parents shop is in a tiny Texas town, so when working in New York all of Katie’s hard work means close to squat.
After struggling for a year Katie gets discovered by a company that no one has ever heard of but is apparently leading in its field. What is that field? No one seems to know that either. Only when Katie starts work there does she discover that they manufacture spells – no, not trick ones, real ones – and are currently struggling to compete against one of their ex-employees evil ventures against them.
Katie for me was a boring character. She moaned groaned and whined throughout and still managed to be miss perfect. Everything just came easy to her, she was working there two days before being promoted to the CEO’s assistant, did that for two days before becoming the new head of the new marketing department that was created just for her.
I was almost glad that Owen the brilliant magician didn’t go for her because then I probably would have thrown the book across the room and moved on.
Then there was the premise of the whole story, it sounded like a slightly older version of Harry Potter, let’s take you into a secret world that no one knows about, where you are so special that everyone wants to meet you. Let’s play with some spells and enchantments and then you can save the day against the bad guy.
The difference? I loved Harry Potter. Enchanted Inc. put me to sleep.
Then there were the spells themselves. People buy spells that are basically little tiny books that contain what you need in them but you can only use them once and not maliciously. Huh? Talk about take the fun out of everything. Yet even though the entire book was about the spell manufacturing industry, we get to see one – that’s right just one – spell in action, and it backfired.
Enchanted Inc. sounded really fun when I first picked it up, but it was a complete disappointment. Merely the fantasy life of an overlooked office worker who wants to be special for being boringly normal.
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