Reviewed by Jess
TITLE: Magic Ties Together 
AUTHOR: Nina Begonia
PUBLISHER: Less Than Three Press
LENGTH: 103 pages
RELEASE DATE: April 4, 2018
BLURB:
Ira has one eye, a back-alley accuracy charm, and a policy of taking what he can get.
Lajos has a sword, a stoic façade that crumbles quickly under pressure, and a mysterious past.
When a routine monster attack leads to the men being magically bound together, unable to part without being violently ill, Ira is horrified. Worse, the link means they can sense each other’s every emotion. And as time goes on, Ira starts to wonder which emotions are truly his, and which are just a result of the magic…
REVIEW:
The idea for this story was a fantastic seed that just wasn’t planted with enough nurturing.
First of all, I have no idea what the world within this story looks like. It seems like pretty straightforward action/adventure/fantasy, but I have no clue where they are, what Ira’s job really is, what they fought for in the oft-mentioned war, what the non-human characters look like, or what the rest of the world is up to. We’re given two main characters and a small set of minor characters who seem to be working and wandering aimlessly in a bunch of caves, and sometimes there are monsters. This is a half-formed setting that needed a whole novel in and of itself to explain.
Ira is a decent enough main character. We’ve seen his type before—a smooth-talking, take-no-crap war veteran who prefers a good meal and a quickie to any type of real emotional entanglement. He was pretty fun to spend a story with. But his attachment (magical and emotional) to Lajos seemed forced and flat, and their sexual chemistry was non-existent. And Lajos himself never gained a very distinct personality or voice. This read almost like a Fantasy AU of some popular fan-fiction ship—anachronistic voice and language ran rampant, almost like the fantasy setting was an afterthought rather than a major plot point.
A trope like this needs length and detail to work. It just doesn’t work within novella format. Ira and Lajos are magically bound together, but we know so little about the why and how of their unfortunate situation. I wanted more story about how they try to push each other away and how magic keeps pulling them back together. We needed to see them fall for each other within this trope, but instead, the magical bond seemed to be practically forgotten for the majority of the book. Ira and Lajos’ romance develops completely normally, which defeats the purpose of magic intervention. And when they were finally freed from magic, there was no real sense of relief, which is a bad sign.
While the idea for this story was nice and the main character was likable, I found the work as a whole to be confusing, muddled, and ultimately forgettable. I was drawn to it because of the “stuck together” trope, but if that is the deciding factor for you as well, better books are out there that showcase this device.
RATING: 
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