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.

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My finalist:

My congratulations to the author 😀

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

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.