What is SPFBO 9?  This is  a competition where authors of self-published fantasy can enter their work. The objective to find a winner out of the 300 entries submitted.  Ten judges (or judging teams) each receive 30 entrants.  Each judge/team will eventually submit one finalist to the second round where a winner will eventually be decided upon. Check out Mark Lawrence’s post here to look at this year’s entrants, judges and allocations list.  Also, check out this page to see all the lovely finalists and the scoreboard for Phase 2 of the competition.

***

This is a coming of age story with an interesting magic system and multiple povs.  The writing is good, there is plenty of travel and mystery and I enjoyed the whole ‘void’ concept.  However, I did have some issues that stopped me from loving this book as much as I’d hoped.

Set in the Seven Lands magic is fundamental to everyday life.  Basically, everyone has some element of magic even if it’s fairly simple or mundane.  We quickly learn that when a person turns 13 they can choose to undertake a magical ability test, of course, most participants expect this to be fairly run of the mill – the worst that could happen is maybe a low level magical ability.  As the story begins we meet our two primary characters – Derrius and Orimond.  Disaster strikes for both these characters – which I won’t go into – and sends them both on totally different, independent voyages of discovery.

What I liked about this – I really enjoyed the way the author takes the two main characters along completely different paths.  I enjoyed in particular the way that one character physically went on a real adventure and eventually seemed to find a measure of happiness in his life in spite of his disappointment at the start of the story.  I personally thought the way the characters’ disappointments fed into their eventual choices was very well executed.

The world is quite well explored and I enjoyed all the travel involved – particularly when a group of characters band together to go in search of someone.

I would say this has an epic fantasy feel.  There’s definitely a ‘the world is under threat’ feel and a sense of things generally coming to a head in the most critical fashion.

In terms of my issues.  I think there were too many povs.  I usually enjoy multiple povs but I felt that the characters didn’t feel distinct enough, I was sometimes muddled in terms of who I was reading about and I found the jumps forward in age a little perplexing. Maybe that just speaks of a level of impatience on my part because the timeline/confusion about the characters’ ages does resolve itself.  On top of this I just didn’t find myself forming firm attachments to any of the characters.  Which isn’t to say I disliked their storylines just that a firm favourite never really became apparent.

On top of this, and this is a personal thing of course, but this felt like it could have been shortened to make it a bit more punchy.  As it is the pacing felt a little inconsistent, certain areas felt like they progressed very slowly and then the conclusion seemed to plough forward very quickly indeed.

Anyway, issues aside, this has an easy style of writing, a good amount of world building and a well thought out elemental style magic system that I really liked and although I experienced a few issues I think it will have no problem finding its audience.

I received a copy through the author, for which my thanks.  The above is my own opinion.

My rating 6.5 of 10