Mike Finn > Recent Status Updates

The first three chapters have confronted me with my prejudice against Romance novels. I usually pass over books with covers like this without a second thought, writing them off as formulaic fluff, the cupcakes of genre fiction.

The thing is, a well made cupcake can be a taste sensation.

This is well written, engaging, and cliche-free. I like the protagonist and I want to know what happens next.

The plot is pulling me along by my curiosity using layers of secrets and hidden agendas.
This isn’t the black comedy I thought it’d be. The protagonist’s sociopathy is played straight and seen from her point of view, which makes it quietly disturbing and pleasantly unpredictable.

This series goes from strength to strength. Three interconnected story lines, all of them engaging and each of them with interesting characters. Lots of action but also lots of context and consideration of possiblities and consequences.

A boardingschool for young magicians where the school, the students and teachers feel real and ordinary, except they can all do magic; there’s a powerful demon that’s been invading the campus and eating people at intervals for centuries, magic is taught in same dryly academic tone of any A level subject but with riskier practical sessions and the school has sword-carrying, magic-wielding demon-killing, Martials.

When you’re 20 hours through a book and you’re going ‘No! There can't be only 90 minutes left. I need more.’ you know that the authors have worked magic to entrall your imagination.

I’ve just read a scene where Maggie forces a powerful man from her house with the force of her words and her personality. It was wonderful and very different to the kind of scene this sort of fantasy normal offers.