* Disclaimer *
Everyone is different and likes and dislikes different things. Reading is no exception. One person’s all time favorite might seem to 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 first group of books from Round One of SPFBO#7. Some of us have judged before and some of us are new to the contest, so our first batch took a little longer to sort out than in past years.
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 First Five to Fall.
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A Bad Rune at Angels Deep by Anthony Lowe
“I’m not a god. I’m just mean like one.”
Runes: a form of deployable magick that caused untold devastation during the war. With the stroke of a pen, entire cities were demolished, entire armies decimated—and now one such rune may have come south to Ariasun County.
Acting on scant clues left behind by the vicious lynching of a smuggler, Evaline Cartwright and Trivan Esterhazy head north to track the rune’s passage through the county. All in the hope of destroying the rune—or its possessor—before it can be used for catastrophic ends.
This story has an interesting magic system and some creative worldbuilding. It’s humorous, and the first chapters starts with a good bit of action and intrigue. Some of the judges liked the story’s premise, others thought things happened a bit too conveniently at times. The characters were the biggest issue. Most judges couldn’t connect well with them, and some of the dialog read as stilted because of it.
Overall, a unique world with lots of promise, but not quite enough to balance out the flaws.
Bad Cow by Andrew Hindle
In the last great golden age of the planet Earth, Barry Dell dies in a tragic elevator accident.
On a not-quite proverbial stairway to Heaven, Moskin Stormburg dedicates his life to figuring out where it all went wrong.
In a world slowly choking on its own sewage, the Vandemar sisters do what they can to save a human race that by all rights should be taking its last desperate breaths.
And through it all, the Archangel Gabriel asks himself when it’s okay to dust his hands off and walk away.
This is a story about a dying world and the Angels, the Demons, the Vampires, the lost immortals and the billions and billions of humans trying to live on it. It is a story about a two-thousand-year-long game of musical chairs where somebody switched off the music at the very beginning. And burned the chairs.
As for why it’s called Bad Cow…well you’ll have to read the book and see. The blurb can’t tell you everything.
Bad Cow starts off with the death of its main protagonist, who is then sent back to Earth as an angel, wings and all. As you might have guessed from the summary, it is a humorous tale set in the current day. This humor split our judges down the middle. Half thought it was the writing was clever and compared it to the dry wit of Good Omens, others thought it was trying too hard or missed its mark with many of its jokes. And while the writing and plot are better than others we’ve read in our batch, the split in tastes means we will be saying goodbye to Bad Cow.
The Cutlass Swoon: A New World Romance by Andrew Marc Rowe
Strange lovers in dangerous times, or dangerous lovers in strange times? Only time will tell.
David Holloway is an Ensign on a British galleon with a secret: he’s had enough of the legitimate way of doing things. His master plan? To break bad and join up with a pirate crew. Slicing and dicing and blasting his way into the graces of a cursed Captain Starling, David’s hidden double life in a European mysticism club comes crashing into full view of his crew right around the time he meets the love of his life, the enigmatic Heather Mercado. Before the pair can enjoy their newfound company, betrayal leaves them high and dry, desperate for a crew and a ship and…pretty much everything piratey.
Everything, that is, except for a magical cutlass made of pure ruby.
When he’s not flapping silvern tongue at prospective crew or tangling the regular kind with Heather, David’s skill as a magician emerges. He might have already mastered combat and the mystical arts, but his ability as a leader and a lover will be tested beyond the bounds of reason. As the lines between the real world and David’s spiritual realm blur and disappear, angels and demons and voodoo spirits take centre stage. Can David come to terms with his own past in time to put an end to Captain Starling’s reign of terror? And is it even his job?
Maybe he’ll find out, as long as he brings enough hot chocolate.
This tale of a pirate magician in the making did not click with our judges. While pirates do swear, talk about their visits to brothels and prostitutes, and engage in lots of other less wholesome practices, our consensus was there was too much of the above and not enough of the rest of the story. An interesting premise, but not something that floated our boat, so to speak.
Gleeman’s Tales by Matthew Travagline
Gnochi Gleeman is not like other entertainers. Because of his expansive knowledge of pre-apocalyptic Earth, the stories he tells are valued well beyond the flashes of an illuminator, or the spheres of a juggler. Gnochi spent the first decade of his career telling stories while traveling between taverns, inns, and any hole-in-the-wall which would feed him.
Cleo, a young teen from across the ocean, flees from her chaperone into the woods of an unknown land. During her first months journeying through eastern Lyrinth, she discovers something life-changing about herself. With that discovery comes the knowledge that her life is in grave danger.
Despite a love for the open road and a thrill for telling new audiences about the lost age, Gnochi chooses to retire and focus on curating his family’s hidden library of first-age texts. But the fates would not grant Gnochi the boon of a peaceful retirement. Not long after settling down, he learns his sister and niece have been kidnapped, and in order to free them, he must assassinate the land’s ruling monarch.
On the path to murder, Gnochi runs into Cleo and the unlikely duo seek safe passage to Lyrinth’s capital among the dilapidated tents of a traveling menagerie.
All the while, people across the world are beginning to prepare for the once-in-a-decade winteryear. These winteryears, one of the echoes of the first age still present in the current world, have been ravaging the Earth since it awoke from its eternal winter and recovered from its near destruction thousands of years ago. Will proper preparations be taken before the Earth is blanketed in its yearlong snow?
The idea behind this post-apocalyptic setting is interesting. I tend to have a soft spot for bards as main characters and Gnochi was interesting enough to keep my attention. However, while the setting and characters were interesting, the judges and the prose just didn’t mesh well. So, while not a bad book, some of us just couldn’t get into it the way we could with others in our list.
Lake Merrin by Samuel Colbran
He is a face in the crowd; a nobody, but with every story, there is a beginning.
Travel with this ordinary half-human as he works to find a roof over his head, to put food on the table and stumbles on something beyond his reckoning.
This is his journey; this is his path. His Journal. A Journal of an Adventurer.
Should he stand up to become a hero?
…Will it matter?
Lake Merrin is written like a journal with the main character narrating his story to the reader. The beginning promises interesting intrigue and worldbuilding, but the judges found the writing style too hard to immerse in. It’s possible if the story was just in first-person instead of also being a journal it may have been easier to relate to the characters and the action. Fans of this style of story may enjoy this book, unfortunately, we have to say goodbye to it.
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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 A. A. Freeman, Julia Kitvaria Sarene, Kartik Narayanan, Kerry Smith, Lynn K., 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 communication-76.
Thank you for the insight into my book, it gave me a freah perspective. Also, thank you for the chance as well.