This is not something we ever like to do. Eliminating a book from the competition is never nice, but given that we can only pick one book from thirty to go to the next round, it’s unfortunately necessary.
While we’ve been slowly portioning out reviews over the past few months, the Inn has been busy at work behind the scenes. At the time of writing, we’ve read all of our allotted books, and are currently debating the merits of each of our potential semi-finalists in our group chat. We’ll reveal those to you soon, but for now it’s time for our other books to take the spotlight.
As always, we want to remind you that just because these books didn’t strike a chord with us, that doesn’t mean that they won’t with you. We’ve done our best to communicate our feelings on each so that you can make a more informed decision, so please check out our mini-reviews to see if any of these books catch your interest!
Spirit of Shadow by D.A. Holley
Reviewer: Adam
Finished or DNF: DNF at 43%
My first cut is Spirit of Shadow by D.A. Holley. This one was a little disappointing to me, as I was very much intrigued by the premise. A servant who’s lived his whole life in a palace starts to suspect something is wrong, and ventures down a forbidden staircase.
The author does a good job setting an ominous tone, and the characters felt well defined, especially through good use of dialogue. The prose in general was pretty good, although at times there were sentences that tried to do too much, becoming cumbersome to understand and taking me out of the story.
Unfortunately the mystery and tension built up to a revelation that didn’t completely make sense to me. It felt like there were a lot of plot holes. I DNFed this book, so it is possible they were explained later on – but my goodwill at this point had been lost. The main character’s plan post-revelation was also somewhat obtuse. It seemed as if the characters needed some crucial piece of information to move the plot forward, but I couldn’t buy the character justification.
The worldbuilding failed to connect me to the setting, providing too much information about things that felt irrelevant, and not enough about the immediate setting. Linked to that, there is an extremely ill-advised dialogue choice for a side character. This side character is dark skinned, and is sometimes portrayed as saying ‘dis’ and ‘dare’ instead of ‘this’ and ‘there’. I’m willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt – there’s no other missteps like this that I noticed – but it left a bad taste in my mouth, and I hope it is changed in future editions.
If you like a bit of mystery in your fantasy, with fun characters and a solid tone, you might enjoy Spirit of Shadow.
Burning Promise by Thiago d’Evecque
Reviewer: Adam
Finished or DNF: DNF at 29%
Burning Promise is a revenge story, one in which the protagonist fights her dark impulses within. Unfortunately I found the main character to lack much of a personality, and the worldbuilding was anachronistic in a way that didn’t feel intentional. To add to all that, the story began with an implausibly arranged action scene with little to no explanation as to what’s happening and how a few villagers are able to hold their own against five assassins. It is for these reasons that I could not continue with the story, and will be cutting it at this stage.
Lamp of Light by Alex H Singh
Reviewer: Devin
Finished or DNF: Finished
Lamp of Light is a fairytale-style fantasy with omniscient third person narration and constant head-hopping. It follows the story of Queen Esther Anna as she tries to clear her name having been framed for the murder of her husband. It takes a while for the story to get going, instead jumping back and forth in time to set up her marriage from the point of view of her father, the insolvent King Maurice who feels bad about having to over-tax his people but you know, he’s insolvent. He’s a good man really. In fact the story goes out of its way to ensure we know how good everyone is, telling us that every monarch makes a point of walking amongst the common people in secret, feeding their people from their own stores and taking their positions Very Seriously.
This is quite a short book and a quick, easy read, yet even having read to the end I am not sure who the intended audience is. The prose is simplistic and full of telling to the point that nothing at all was left to me (I was informed a plot was devious, a person was evil, that characters were good, or skilled without ever seeing said plot or deeds) yet despite this the content is decidedly adult. There is a textural obsession with the main character’s purity and innocence and its ability to instantly ensnare the men she meets into wanting to possess and protect her, turning both the man hunting her and the hero into unpleasant characters. Unfortunately, this ‘intoxicating purity’ and their reaction to it is about all I learned about these characters through the course of the story, none of them seeming to have much in the way of a personality beyond Goodness. In fact the only interesting character was the evil one, though the stated reasons for their evil choices made little sense.
All in all this may appeal to readers who like light, fairytale style stories and prefer their characters either wholly good or entirely evil with no messy middle ground.
Prophecy of Convergence by Shannon Pemrick
Reviewer: Devin
Finished or DNF: DNF
I really wasn’t sure what to make of this book before I started reading and I still wasn’t sure what to make of it by the time I stopped. Prophecy of Convergence reads a lot like a wandering DnD campaign with a plot more focussed on gaining life experience than attempting to achieve anything concrete. Much of the world building also comes across as renamed and thinly-veiled aspects from DnD, which isn’t in and of itself a big problem for me—I like me some ttrpgs!—but I didn’t feel it made use of it in any interesting way nor incorporated broader elements of the litrpg genre.
It does start with a prophetic meeting with a dragon god, but although I read through this twice I still couldn’t entirely understand what was going on with it and am unsure if I required some prior knowledge of this world or characters or if it just wasn’t clearly expressed. The blurb made it sound important, but when Aviana paid it little heed in the following chapters I kind of just forgot it had happened at all, the plot having become about the journey for life experience instead.
The setting is idyllic in the beginning and pulls from many classic tropes as it continues, but it lacks a sense of three-dimensionality, because there are plenty of descriptions of places but no sense of cohesion or of how this world works. Perhaps because it’s drawing strongly from a DND style world where such details are what the players make of it, I gleaned no sense of inherent and permanent culture or politics, infrastructure or conflict. Everything was just there with no sense of how it interconnected, or any sense of weight or meaning.
Unfortunately, I found the characters little better. Our protagonist Aviana is good at everything and her sister’s childishness is presented as a stereotype of sweet, pure innocence that bears no resemblance to any child I’ve ever met and I’ve had three of the darn things. I can deal with their chaotic, selfish energy and focus, but Aviana’s sister often made me want to put the book down. It was difficult to connect to any of them, not least because I had no real idea what they were trying to achieve beyond life experience for the sweet innocent sister.
In the end I didn’t wind up finishing this one though I did skim from where I left off, just in case something exciting happened. For the most part it was light and readable, and may appeal to readers who like DnD-based worldbuilding and open-ended journeying. Sadly though, for me, this one is a cut.
The Coyote Chronicles by Anton Le Roy
Reviewer: Hiu
Finished or DNF: DNF at 20%
There are very few books that start with as much action as the Coyote Chronicles. I put down this book at around the 20% mark, but at that point we’d already had a platoon of soldiers face down some dragons, the beheading of a god, and an adventure in another world beyond a portal. That’s particularly impressive given that this book is only around 200 pages long.
Our main character, brought to us in first-person present, is called Veteran. Quite the self-descriptive name, and he seems to fit all the prerequisites: age, regrets, grumpiness, and a frightening level of competence in combat. There are a whole bunch of readers who adore characters like this. Honestly? I’m one of them. It’s an archetype that very rarely gets old. Throw in a bromance, like Vet with his buddy Gregor? Yeah. That’s an easy sell.
So why cut it? Well… The Coyote Chronicles has a lot of ideas, an interesting world, and it relies on some tropes that have historically proven popular for very good reason. But it also features a lot of intangible things that held me at a distance from the characters. While the first person narration gives a slight sense of that ever elusive “voice” I’m always looking for to make a book stand out, I thought it had a tendency to veer towards the melodramatic. Take the following excerpt for instance:
And as ghosts we emerge with skin paled and seemingly lifeless, our bodies limp upon horses white with snow that resemble undead beasts.
That paints a pretty vivid picture, right? It really gets across the weariness of battle. The thing is that this line is lifted from the second page of Chapter 1, shortly after Vet & Gregor slaughter a band of five plucky upstarts without breaking much of a sweat. And while of course this specific sentence isn’t a “flaw” in isolation, I’m highlighting it to illustrate the tendency this book has to jump straight to the N-th degree. The hypercompetence of the main character meant that, despite all of the battles and action in the portion I read, I never really felt like he was in any danger. This made for a strange juxtaposition between Vet floating his way through a bunch of fights, and the purple-tinged prose treating everything with a degree of (what felt like) exaggeration.
Add in a bunch of filter words and a tendency to be overly-wordy in certain scenarios, and my immersion just wasn’t there. I feel like the bones of something really fun are there for fans of books like this, but at the 20% mark I wasn’t feeling the desire to keep reading. Unfortunately, it’s a cut.
Willow of Ashes by Ellie Raine
Reviewer: Hiu
Finished or DNF: DNF at 20%
If I had to describe Willow of Ashes in a word, it would be… hyperactive. This is a book that throws a lot of worldbuilding information at you, and fast. That goes hand-in-hand with how magic-heavy this book is from the off. Many of the characters are shapeshifters — distinguishable by their ears. Wolf-shifters will have wolf ears, bear-shifters have bear ears, and so on. There’s also some necromancy going on too, with one brother sharing the body of another after he, uh, died in his first one.
As with all books in my batch, I initially screened Willow of Ashes by reading up to the 20% mark. Unfortunately, it was one of two books I decided to DNF at that point. It’s a very dialogue heavy book, but with that comes quite a bit of as-you-know-bob or maid-and-butler exposition. In all honesty, it all just felt like too much information was being thrown at me too quickly for me to process any of it.
It’s never nice to have to cut a book from this competition, especially when you can envision a fanbase of readers who might love the book that you’re eliminating. With that in mind, I can see Willow of Ashes appealing to those readers who read a lot of web fiction — it has that same colourful personality and breakneck pacing to it that a lot of successful web-fics have. If that’s you, or you’re intrigued by what Willow of Ashes seems to offer, I’d encourage you to check it out.
Highland Court Chronicles by Farida Mestek
Reviewer: Kop
Finished or DNF: DNF
While I thought the idea of the story was wonderful, I found the execution to be lacking. I loved the idea of the supposed damsel in distress being the one to do the saving instead. And the dynamics of the characters, especially between the MC and the grandmother, were really fun to read. Unfortunately, I found the pacing of the book hindered my enjoyment. It just felt like nothing was happening, and the overall story just didn’t lend itself to those sorts of vibes in my opinion.
Of Shade and Shadow: The Exiled by Rebecca Schmid & Niamh Schmid
Reviewer: Kop
Finished or DNF: DNF
I’m sad to say that nothing really worked for me with this book. The writing, characters, world…it just wasn’t for me.
Neglected Merge by Eve Koguce
Reviewer: Kop
Finished or DNF: DNF
The writing just was not for me. It felt like there were too many unnecessary moments being described in my opinion. I’m all for little bits of detail, but to me this went beyond that and into microscope level. Beyond that the characters and plot weren’t enough to divert my attention away from the writing.
Commiserations to all of the authors eliminated at this stage! For all of our remaining authors, you will likely be receiving a full review from one of our judges in the coming weeks. From there, five of you will be selected as semi-finalists. Best of luck!
To see all the information on the Fantasy Inn’s SPFBO grouping this year, including review links and elimination status, check out our SPFBO 7 Hub page.
Will any of those left standing from the first round be receiving reviews as well?