As of now, there are three books left in my group that have not been eliminated. You might already know which books these are if you’ve been following our SPFBO Hub post.
For everyone else, the books are:
I reviewed RADIO a couple of months ago, and I liked it enough for it to survive the first couple of rounds of cuts. To summarize my thoughts and add some additional thoughts to my review:
RADIO is wildly imaginative. The sheer creativity alone could have carried the book this far, but there were also a couple of key characters that lodged themselves in my brain for weeks after reading.
However, the main character is also a jerk. He’s almost completely unlikable at the start, and while he does grow throughout the story, there’s only so much an immortal god who’s been around for thousand of years can change in a few weeks. The guy also hogs the spotlight, making it hard for many side characters to share the stage.
Overall, I couldn’t put this book down. It’s not every day you get to read a story of immortal gods turning the Eiffel Tower into a giant mind-controlling radio, after all.
The Broken Man by Brandon Jones
If you like books about thieves in over their heads, scary crime lords, and sinister magic, this is for you. The Broken Man reminded me quite a bit of The Lies of Lock Lamora by Scott Lynch, and any book that can pull that off is doing something right.
There are a few unusual worldbuilding choices that threw me at first: the main character seems to have magical gluten intolerance and common curse words include symptoms for drug addiction. I also didn’t feel that the main character fully earned some of his persuasion and swagger, but that didn’t make watching him bluff his way out of a tight spot any less entertaining.
As far as I can tell, this is Brandon Jones’s first published book, and it’s an impressive debut. The Broken Man only has a handful of ratings on Amazon and Goodreads, so if you jump on early you could earn some hipster points if the book takes off.
A Dream of Fire J.R. Rasmussen
I also reviewed A Dream of Fire a while back. To summarize my thoughts and add a few things I’ve thought of since the first review:
Dragons and magic schools are a large part of what drew me into fantasy. This has both, with the unique twist of following a protagonist who is the only non-magical teacher at the magic school.
This in an incredibly lean book. Nothing is wasted, we get right into the action, and it reads very quickly. On the other hand, I wish there had been more exploration of the side characters and time spent actually seeing our hero teach classes. There are some nuanced character relationships—like a problem student secretly admiring the protagonist and considering him their favorite teacher—that I would have loved to see even more of.
An interesting thing about this book is that while there are areas I wish it could have done more, there isn’t any one aspect that I can easily critique. It’s efficiently and competently written, drawing on a lot of epic fantasy staples while subverting a few along the way.
All three of these were excellent books. After picking my semi-finalist, I offered one of them to Hiu to consider in his pool of potential semi-finalists. So on that note, A Dream of Fire will get another chance at moving forward! While it may still be cut, it survives in SPFBO for now.
And now, my official pick for one of the Fantasy Inn’s semi-finalists…
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