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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ling Ling Huang is a writer and violinist. She plays with several ensembles including the Music Kitchen, Washington Heights Chamber Orchestra, Urban Playground Chamber Orchestra, Shattered Glass, and Experiential Orchestra, with whom she won a Grammy award in 2020. Natural Beauty is her first novel.
Published: April 4, 2023 by Dutton Page count: 272 pages Formats: audiobook, ebook, hardback, paperback
Published: May 14, 2024 by Azimuth Length: 374 pages (Kindle) Formats: audiobook, ebook, paperback Literary awards: SPFBO Award for Best Fantasy Book (2024) Series Land of Exile #1
OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: With Lore and her allies scattered across the world, all hope seems lost. King Bastian reigns under the influence of an evil god, making deals with despots and undoing the reforms made in the last few months. But destiny has its own plans. Even scattered, Lore and her friends have one last chance to thwart the god trying to reshape the world, one last chance to steal his power back. It may just unfortunately take their own lives to pull it off.
The Nightshade God is the kind of finale that lands the plane competently, but without much pizzazz. It isn't a BAD book, but it lacked tension and failed to make me invested in the personal stakes for the characters. As an example, look no further than the central plot of the story. Book two ended with our characters scattered across the world for various reasons, and early in The Nightshade God, they all learn of objects that have been hidden for centuries that are important to defeating the central villain. Rather conveniently, there's one of these hidden objects in each of the locations these scattered characters ended up. While there's some attempt to explain this as destiny, it felt instead like it was giving the characters a thing to do before bringing them all together for the finale.
The characters themselves also really have very little growth to go through. There's still pining and angst between the characters but nothing that we hadn't seen previously. The one new romantic pairing that was introduced honestly left me baffled. Worst of all, the finale felt like it betrayed the themes of the entire series and the very lessons that the characters were supposed to be learning.
CONCLUSION: All that being said, I was never in a place where I was hate-reading The Nightshade God. It was simply that I was never excited to pick the book up, never dying to know what could possibly happen next. Every plot point was simply a hurdle to overcome fairly quickly in the journey to the inevitable conclusion. It's a book that I can honestly say I walked away from simply....whelmed.
Official Author Info: Nicholas W Fuller has been writing all of his life. He began writing his first novel while still in fifth grade—a science fiction story featuring an alien race inspired by his neighbor’s basset hounds. While that work remains incomplete, Nicholas has worked on various blogs and stories over the years, including publication in JCM Berne's Grimdwarf Magazine and earning an honorable mention from ElegantLiterature.com. Nicholas also started a youtube channel in early 2023 where he posts videos talking about books and other fun nerdy things as well as his interviews with authors and other creatives.
SPFBO Champions' League Review: The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble's Braids by Michael McClung
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael McClung was born and raised in Texas, lived in Southeast Asia for twenty years, and currently resides in Poland. He has published nine novels, a novella and a short story collection. His first novel was published by Random House in 2003, and in 2016 he won Mark Lawrence's inaugural SPFBO contest with The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble's Braids. He goes by @mcclungmike on Twitter, but doesn’t do the Facebook anymore, because reasons. He occasionally talks about stuff on his blog at somethingstickythiswaycomes.blogspot.com if you're interested in, uh, stuff being talked about.
Published: November 28, 2012 by Michael McClung Length: 208 pages (Kindle) Formats: Literary awards: SPFBO Award for Best Fantasy Book (2015) Series Amra Thetys #1
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