#SPFBO Semi Finalists and Finalist Announcement

Posted On 27 November 2019

Filed under Book Reviews
Tags: ,

Comments Dropped 16 responses

SPFBO1

Today sees, for me, the completion of Stage 1 of the SPFBO competition.  I’ve really enjoyed the first stage and I have to say I had some incredible books in my batch.

Firstly, the following books are the ones I’ve completed fully and reviewed (I’ve provided mini reviews for my other books as I went along.

Cry Havoc by Jack Frey

Healer’s Ruin by Chris O’Mara

The Lore of Prometheus by Graham Austin-King

From the Shadows of the Owl Queen’s Court(Yarnsworld #4) by Benedict Patrick

Never Die by Rob J Hayes

Sir Thomas the Hesitant and the Table of Less Valued Knights by Liam Perrin

Vortex Visions by Elise Kova

The Blade Within by Jackson Lear

River of Thieves by Clayton Snyder

From the above I have chosen five Semi Finalists, to be fair to the authors I would stress that all of these books were very good and I definitely recommend them all.  And in fact I am hoping to be able to go back and read fully some of the other books from my batch – time allowing.

My five semi finalists:

 

And this is where the really tough decision kicked in and kicked me to the floor (not at all dramatic)!

I’m not going to deny that it’s been very difficult to choose a finalist.  The nine books above were all very good and I recommend them – narrowing that list down to semi finalists was tough enough – going further and choosing just one – well, it was stressful and if it made me feel like that then I can’t even begin to imagine how all the authors feel.

Basically I narrowed my choice down to three.  I made a list of all sorts of pros and cons and was then left with two choices – which I really couldn’t choose between.

I don’t always score my books but I rated different aspects of both books in this case to try and find a score for each and see if that would help. Even with that in mind it’s been difficult to stick to one decision and there has been lots of to ing and fro ing and a tiny bit of dithering.  In the end I’ve chosen my finalist but I would stress that this was a really difficult decision.

*

*

*

 

My finalist:

NeverDie

My congratulations to the author 😀

 

I would also like to put forward under the ‘Senlin Safety Net’:

TheLoreof

 

My apologies to the other authors from my batch.  I’ve had a fantastic time reading all these books and I wish that I could choose more than one but that’s the nature of the competition.  Thank you so much to all the authors for taking the time to enter and for taking the risk to put forward your work.  You definitely get my round of applause.

 

 

Advertisement

16 Responses to “#SPFBO Semi Finalists and Finalist Announcement”

  1. maxinesobsessions

    YAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSS. I haven’t read all of the books from your group, but of the ones I have, this is definitely my favourite. I love that your top two books are so completely different, it’s one of the many awesome things about this competition.

    Good luck with the next round 🙂

  2. Tammy

    Oh cool, congrats to all the authors but especially Rob for moving on to the final round!

    • @lynnsbooks

      This was such a difficult decision to make. I had such a good batch of books. It does make me feel guilty.
      Lynn 😀

  3. Captain's Quarters

    Out of all the books ye have read for this contest I find it fascinating (and awesome) that yer two favorites were the ones I added to my TBR based on their blurbs and yer reviews. I will certainly have to read them both!
    x The Captain

    • @lynnsbooks

      I hope you enjoy them and I will look forward to reading your thoughts.
      Lynn 😀

  4. Paul's Picks

    Very cool!

  5. sjhigbee

    Wow – these all look brilliant. Huge congratulations to the two finalists – and I’m so very glad I wasn’t the one who had to whittle down your contenders… You’ve every right to be dramatic! Congratulations to you, too…

  6. November : My Month In Covers | Books and travelling with Lynn

    […] to catch up.  I’ve also finished Stage 1 of the SPFBO competition – my final post is here – this was a tough decision to make but I’m relieved to have completed the first part […]

  7. jdpepe

    Great choice

  8. Sunday Post – 1st December, 2019 #Brainfluffbookblog #SundayPost | Brainfluff

    […] Semi Finalists and Finalist Announcement https://lynns-books.com/2019/11/27/spfbo-semi-finalists-and-finalist-announcement/ I’m in awe of how my blogging buddy, Lynn, tackles the task of judging this competition that […]

  9. waytoofantasy

    I’ve heard so many great things about this one, not too surprised to see it at the top! Congrats to Rob and great job with all of these reviews, Lynn! Looking forward to phase 2.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s
https://lynns-books.com/2019/11/27/spfbo-semi-finalists-and-finalist-announcement/
lynns-books.com
CC-MAIN-2023-06
134044
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:74EMGZDTAN43IZ4FV32KWZINIBDJCXTB
<urn:uuid:cb5e9cb2-b51a-4fc3-a662-c03d0b59ec79>
2023-02-01T21:36:55Z
192.0.78.24
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:KJVV6NKWSDMSQTYQ4KVJ6TW3E2EFSL5O
<urn:uuid:3d3538b9-d582-4f26-9f5d-41978afacd6f>
https://lynns-books.com/2019/11/27/spfbo-semi-finalists-and-finalist-announcement/
response
<urn:uuid:23792505-b07f-4b3e-894e-ed8824e8f15e>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2023-06
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for January/February 2023
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-108
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/