Book Review - Bound by Kira Saito

Sixteen year old Arelia LaRue lives in New Orleans where the music is loud, voodoo queens inhabit every street corner, and the ghosts are alive and well. Despite her surroundings, all she wants is to help her Grand-mere Bea pay the rent and save up for college.

When her best friend Sabrina convinces her to take a well-paying summer job at the infamous Darkwood plantation, owned by the wealthy LaPlante family, Arelia agrees.

However, at Darkwood strange things start to happen, and gorgeous Lucus LaPlante insists that he needs her help. Soon, the powers that Arelia has been denying all her life, come out to play and she discovers mysteries about herself that she could have never imagined.

Bound is a young adult supernatural romance with an interesting and unique premise that falls far from being what it could be. A story about a girl discovering her voodoo history could make an interesting novel but in this case is poorly executed.

Our three main characters Arelia, Sabrina and Lucus are one dimensional and unconvincing cardboard personalities whose reactions to each other and the occurrences in the book are both unrealistic and baffling. I couldn’t like the protagonist Arelia, the teenager who speaks with Voodoo spirits (Ioa), at all. She is whiny and completely immature even for her age. She behaves horribly to Lucus (the predictable mysterious good looking love interest) judging him and calling him a shallow and useless person for the majority of the book simply because he comes from a family with money. Lucus, on the other hand, is happy to lead Arelia’s gold digger of a best friend Sabrina on while accepting all the criticism that Arelia throws at him. Actually aplogising for it all the while making googly eyes at her and hiding a mysterious secret. To say these characters frustrated me is an understatement.

This book was outstanding example of what I hate most about some of these self-published series. As soon as it started to get somewhat interesting, it ended. Abruptly. Obviously to encourage the reader to purchase the next book in the series but in my opinion there is a right way and a wrong way to do this and if a book is interesting and well written then a reader will want to continue on regardless of how big a cliff-hanger you throw onto the end of it.

That said, I didn’t HATE this book entirely. The Hoodoo/Voodoo storyline and the history of the Darkwood plantation were interesting and was what kept me reading up until the end. As I said before Bound is a story with potential but in this case… well I’m just glad I didn’t pay for it! I have to say, I doubt very much that I will be continuing with this series.

I gave this book 2 out of 5 stars on Goodreads