* Disclaimer *
Everyone is different and likes and dislikes different things. Reading is no exception. One person’s all-time favorite might seem too bland or too high stakes for another. That being said, the opinions of our judges in this contest are just that, opinions. Just because we let a book go, doesn’t mean it isn’t good. It could be your next favorite, who knows?
However, since this is a contest, there can be only one winner. Hence it is necessary to work our way down to our favorite from our batch of thirty titles. We will be letting books go five at a time, until we reach our semi-final list for Round One. These groups of five are being let go in no particular order. So, the books we say goodbye to today are not worse than books we let go in the next batch. They are just the first ones we read that didn’t quite click with us as a group.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you can learn more about the contest here.
Today we say goodbye to our second group of books from Round One of SPFBO#8. In this group of five are some intriguing concepts, good writing, and interesting characters. Unfortunately, for different reasons, they didn’t stack up against the rest of the competition.
Here are our Second Five to Fall.
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Born of Fire by R. R. Carter
The nightmares are back.
Years after the deaths of his parents, the dreams that haunted Jax have returned. He’s about to discover why, by being burned alive, just like they were. When the flames subside, the man left standing isn’t the same one who burned.
The Numen allows him to see the Whispers.
Jax is a Myth, a descendant of a lost bloodline, born to fight the darkness hunting humanity. Guided by others like him, he reaches Mythaven, a magical sanctuary cut into the Colorado mountains. His new friends need his help, but Jax must conquer the demons of his past before he can save the future.
Fantasy and reality are two sides of the same page.
The lore is real, witches, werewolves, nymphs, and even dragons exist amongst us. Hidden throughout time, they’ve been fighting, dying, for humanity. When myth becomes truth, can Jax make it through his own story?
While the concept of Born of Fire intrigued our judges, it did not live up to our expectations. The biggest issue, which might be a big plus for some, is the lack of grey areas in both the plot and the characters. The good guys are good. The bad guys are bad. End of story.
The writing was also a bit simple and some of the judges thought the characters acted younger than the ages they were written at. But, if you are tired of anti-heroes and enjoy YA and noblebright (the opposite of grimdark) this book might be for you! We, however, had to let this story go.
The Forest of Forgotten Vows by Grace Carlisle
There are monsters in the woods.
When I come back to my childhood home for the first time in seven years, a tiny man living under the porch stairs greets me like an old friend, and it only gets stranger from there.
A hunter who stalks the woods, a monster in the river, and a man draped in shadows who offers me a bargain I can’t refuse.
They remember me, but my past is in tatters, forcing me to follow the trail my childhood self left me years ago—the first time I entered the world known as Faerie.
Each answer I find pulls me deeper into the web of political machinations of an otherworldly court. But nothing answers the biggest question: “Why me?”
And how can I possibly survive when I can’t even trust my own mind?
The Forest of Forgotten Vows follows a woman with mental illness dealing with a world that treats her as other, strange, and lesser than. And while it did a good job showing how hard it can be to live with mental illness, the main character does little to push back against the forces that be. Our judges felt she was too meek and the grandmother character too harsh. Instead of rooting for a character dealing with issues, or sympathizing with someone dealing with hardships, we found ourselves wishing the main character would stand up for herself, even a little bit. And unfortunately, it did not end up making our finals list.
Manipulator’s War by Elise Carlson
All roads lead to war.
Nonbinary Ruarnon is determined to prove their worth as heir to Tarlah’s perfect King. But when their parents are abducted, Ruarnon must rule Tarlah in the face of unreliable allies, a brutal expansionist neighbour, and binary male warriors who doubt the lead of a bookish enby youth.
Neighbouring King Kyura faces opposition, as peace-loving ruler of warmongering subjects who dream of expanding their empire. Ruarnon is vulnerable in the absence of their allies, but when Kyura rejects calls to conquer Tarlah once and for all, assassins threaten his family and mutiny threatens his reign.
Trapped in Ruarnon’s world, Linh is desperate to return to her family in Australia and isn’t above using her host’s belief that she’s a figure from local myth to achieve it. But her gateway home lies on the far side of a brewing war, and her only transport is Ruarnon’s absent allies, sailing to Tarlah’s aid.
A new breed of creature threatens them all: a plague of monsters sailing towards Kyura and Ruarnon’s lands. Linh’s monster observations could save Kyura and Ruarnon’s people, ending the war between them, and clearing Linh’s homeward path. But the strategy’s price is dear; Linh must risk her life aiding Ruarnon. And to secure peace with Kyura’s unruly subjects, Ruarnon’s ultimate test as heir risks betrayal and Tarlah’s bloody defeat.
Our judges were pleasantly surprised to find the main character of Manipulator’s War, Ruarnon, was non-binary. And while we love having more diversity in fantasy, we felt Ruarnon’s gender identity could have been handled better. The beginning pages of the book treat their gender reveal as almost an info-dump, where it would have been better to spread out things about them more throughout the story.
A lot of other bits of info were also handle in more of a telling rather than showing way. And though we wanted to love this story of an enby getting stuck in the middle of a fantasy war, we had to let this one go too.
[Editor’s Note: Author’s comment to this review and our response is in the comments here.]
Oathbound Healer by Selkie Myth
Elaine is ripped from this world to Pallos, a land of unlimited possibilities made real by a grand System governing classes, skills, and magic.
An ideal society? What is this, a fantasy novel?
Adventures? Right this way!
A Grand quest? Nah.
Friends and loot? Heck yes!
Humans are the top dog? Nope, dinosaur food.
Healing and fighting? Well, everything is trying to eat her.
Join Elaine as she travels around Pallos, discovering all the wonders and mysteries of the world, trying to find a place where she belongs, hunting those elusive mangos, all while the ominous Dragoneye Moons watch her every move.
Oathbound Healer was a divisive title with our judges. A girl from our world is reborn into a gaming system and is shocked by the society within it. Women are more or less property of their husbands, there is a form of slavery or indentured servitude, and a scene where a husband beats his wife for “not being in the mood”.
The tone changes after a while and some of our judges ended up enjoying the story and are considering reading more of the series. But the others were too put off by the harsh tone, especially in a middle grade/YA story, and couldn’t get into it, so we let this story go.
Tails by Jessica Grace Wright
Aria is a professional mermaid at an aquarium. She wears a fake tail and performs for visitors.
All her life, she has been in love with the mythical creatures.
But her whole world is turned upside down when they turn out to be more than myths and she gets caught in the middle of feuding cities from deep under the sea.
This YA mermaid tale did not swim well with our judges. The writing put the story in a middle grade category, but the romance and the way many of the characters acted was very YA. The tone between the two made it hard to sink into the story.
There were also a few parts that rubbed some judges the wrong way, including sexualizing an underage girl and some fat shaming. Unfortunately, these issues meant we had to cross this story off our list.
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We would like to thank all the authors for letting us read their work! We congratulate you on having the courage to enter the contest and wish you all much success in the future!
Our judges this year are Julia Kitvaria Sarene, Kartik Narayanan, Kerry Smith, Max Freeman, and Jennie Ivins (me). If you’d like to learn more about us, including our likes and dislikes, you can read about them here.
Any queries should be directed at me, Jennie Ivins, via DM (Facebook/Twitter).
Title image by Kateryna Hliznitsova.
JC Kang
Hi,
I write to you as a contestant in the SPFBO 8 competition. Firstly, thank you for taking the time to read my book (Manipulator’s War). I do of course respect your decision to eliminate it from the competition. I would however like to give you some feedback re. comments made about nonbinary representation, which I as a nonbinary person find problematic.
I refer to the idea that a nonbinary gender identity is ‘revealed’ and that it needs to be ‘shown’, when I doubt anyone would say the same about a binary male or binary female character’s gender. That a character could be a man or a woman is something we take for granted that has no need of a ‘reveal’. So why can’t Ruarnon simply be nonbinary? If gendered names can tell the reader that Tim is a man and Mary is a woman (and nonbinary names are not a thing), why must a nonbinary person’s gender be shown instead of told? Why can’t the existence of a nonbinary character just be stated as a fact, when the existence of binary male and female characters is both stated and taken for granted in fiction?
As an author I appreciate that showing instead of telling generally speaking gives readers a more satisfying experience, but as a nonbinary person I think trying to show instead of tell a nonbinary character’s gender identity very much runs the risk of nonbinary erasure, instead of nonbinary representation. Because if Ruarnon exhibits some masculine AND some feminine traits, and their physical descriptions are androgynous, how is the reader to know whether the fantasy name ‘Ruarnon’ refers to an ‘effeminate’ man, a ‘masculine’ woman, a gender nonconforming man or woman, a trans person or a nonbinary person?
I would love to live in a world where I can show an agender or gender fluid character and most readers would immediately (or at least eventually) recognise their gender identity, because decades of living in a cishet society has not socially conditioned them to anticipate characters being only or almost always binary and cis gender male or female. But as a nonbinary person I’m well aware that the world isn’t there yet.
Sorry to write you an essay, but as a person of a gender that is barely represented in fiction, nonbinary representation is something I am very passionate about, so I didn’t want to leave a blog that I felt expressed problematic views about it and double standards of gender representation go unchallenged.
Sincerely,
Elise.
Hi Elise, thank you for giving us feedback. We did not mean to offend you or any other non-binary person, and will try better in the future.
We did not mean to imply that a person’s gender needs to be revealed, or that only a non-binary person’s gender would need to be revealed. We have had the same complaint with binary characters’ descriptions in the past.
We prefer writing where we learn about the character over time regardless of their gender, sex, race, etc. Non-binary, as you mentioned, is harder than some other traits to write, but there are stories we have read and loved that have handled their non-binary character descriptions in a more subtle way, while still getting the point across. Frontloading character descriptions, worldbuilding, and plot is just not something we like in stories.
In your story, we were excited by the prospect of a non-binary main character, but did not enjoy the style of writing as much as we hoped. This opinion would not have changed if the character was a binary man or binary woman. If that did not come out clearly in our review, I apologize.
Again, thank you for reaching out. We always want to make sure we are handling people’s identities with respect, and again will try to do better in the future.
Jennie Ivins | Editor
Hey!
Thank you for taking the time to read my book! I clearly failed somewhere hard along the line, as I was trying to write adult, not middle school/YA. Whoops! That’s on me!