I had a hard time getting into this book and ended up giving up about 100 pages in. I love fantasy but this book was overly descriptive when it didn't need to be

it's possible i wasn't in the mood for a book like this so maybe I will revisit it later.

Long but impressive world building -- A foundling becomes a hero, a thief discovers his moral compass, a soldier is regains his nobility and a Prince steps out of his brother's shadow, what more could you want in an action packed fantasy read? As James Rollins is known to do, a skillfully crafted thriller with character development that has you instantly pulling for the underdogs. Gripping fight scenes and emotionally wrought found-family scenes. Worth every minute.

DNF at 30%.

I am very disappointed with this book. I'm not sure where all the 5 star reviews are coming from.

This is a poorly constructed fantasy world that brings nothing new to the table. It just relies on the same old tropes.

Same could be said about the characters. Nyx especially is the perfect example of the Chosen One trope. The only character I found remotely likeable is the thief, but we get very little of his POV in the bit I managed to read.

Also, why are all female characters other than NYC depicted as mean, entitled and ugly? Are we still doing that trope? That our female protagonist is this exceptional snow flake that every other woman her age is jealous of enough to wreak abuse on? Yawn, okay, you lost me there.

There is also the issue of telling versus showing. And I mean the infodumps are frequent and unbearable, bogging down the story. I mean, I quit at 30% and the real story hasn't even really started yet.

Sorry, I'm not wasting any more time on this series.

PS: I received an advanced copy of this book via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Epic fantasy with lots of danger and expense. This was a long read for me and took a bit to get through. I really liked Nyk and her story. There’s also science fiction elements in this read which is nice. Multiple point of views can occasionally get confusing but just take your time with it and it’s an enjoyable read.

I was actually shocked that I wound up enjoying this as much as I did?

Which definitely sounds bad, but I was skeptical. I was quickly won over by the world and the character dynamics tho. Character dynamics will do it every time. I wasn't even bothered by the trope of different sets of characters unknowingly working toward going to a similar location. The narrative always found ways to surprise me [ that whole section in the middle of the book with the insects is still giving me nightmares all these months later ], characters were constantly doing things I didn't expect and yet worked within the plot and how the narrative had previously established them to be. The world itself was inventive without spending unnecessary time detailing to the reader how exactly this setup actually functioned.

Overall it's definitely one of my favorite fantasies of the year, one that has left me pleasantly surprised, and having read the ending I can't wait to see where the story goes and how these characters are going to work together going forward.

The Starless Crown by James Rollins
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A new fantasy series centered around a doomsday prophecy and a ragtag group of people who want to save the world.
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My thoughts:
-I love the plot of this book! Even though this was a fantasy world there were so maybe hints of similarities to our planet that were enjoyable.

-I enjoyed all of the fantasy animals that were a part of this story and the connections the animals have with the human characters.

-The first two thirds of the book were a little slower with world building and it took me a long time to read this book because I kept getting distracted by other books. But I binged the last third of the book in one night, that last third is were ALL the action is!

-I am very curious where the rest of the series will go, but not sure how quickly I will get around to the rest of the series when it comes out. Especially seeing how long it took for me read through this book.

4⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ If you are a high fantasy fan you will definitely want to give this story a try!

I liked this, but I didn't love it. It's a good YA esque fantasy, but nothing too special about it. I'd buy a few copies for the book store.

This cover is phenomenal! It speaks of high fantasy, spectacular world-building and excellent story telling.

I've not read Rollins before and was completely engaged with the Foreword by the author where he spoke about how he brought Science into this Fantasy tale to make it stand apart from the rest. He stated his tale was better than the rest and promised a fantastic story.

So imagine my surprise when this story didn't stand out from the rest. What a bummer!

I don't understand what Rollins meant about bringing Science into the story as it didn't feel much different than other fantasy books I've read. If he's referring to examples such as the rotation of the earth explaining seasons, then we all passed that knowledge base after 3rd grade. So I'm very confused about his declaration.

There are a lot of characters, even beyond the several MC's. I kept up on them for awhile but then it got a bit confusing. The characters themselves could have been picked out of any fantasy tale - a girl that is special but has been abused in her past, a boy who is trying to make a name for himself, a man who needs to right past wrongs.

There is a lot of back story for the MC's in the first 40-50% of the book, and this is a big book (532 pages/22 hours for audiobook)!

The story line - a prophet foretells the end of the world beginning with the moon falling. A small group of characters band together to try and prevent this from happening. Cool, but again, pretty standard plot line.

If you enjoy the Fantasy genre, this is a good one to have on your list as it is a decent fantasy read. But for me, it wasn't the 'Outstanding' read it was touted to be and was unnecessarily long, IMO.

Thank you to #Tor and #NetGalley for this ARC. All opinions expressed are my own.

I am a James Rollins' fan but this book was not my cup of tea. I do not like fantasy and did not finish the book.

This is one of those books I would shelve under the “wasted potential” folder. This book had so much going on for the first 40% that I truly thought this would end up being a favourite. But nope. The rest of the book was repetitive and so pointless that I soon lost all interest.
More so, this is the kind of fantasy I would expect to be written by a Straight White Male™️ two decades ago. This has some of the tropes I really hate reading in any book - you can clearly make out from the descriptions of women that it was written from a male gaze. Not to mention the unnecessary fatphobic language that really put me off. If you see me rolling my eyes while reading a book, know that I’ll have some scathing things to tell about it. And this one? I was rolling my eyes a LOT.
It’s been over two months since I read this and while I can go on and on about all the things I hated about it, the only thing I can remember being good was the prologue? And probably that I liked the bats a lot? Clearly, this is just your average trope-y fantasy with nothing that makes it stand out.

My verdict - Skip it. There are better fantasy books out there.
I am not wasting my time on the sequel either.

TW for attempted rape, gore, child birth.

Thanks to @netgalley and the publisher for the e-arc.

I so rarely post a DNF on a book, but this was one of those times.

I thought the worldbuilding was, well, unimaginative. The world is Urth, and the school is run by nonnes. Using y instead of i or e. Blech.

Also, the treatment of females was offensive. Penetration of the vagina under any circumstance, including gang rape, will turn the woman into an outcast. The boys, of course, grow up under a different set of rules.

The story also has a plethora of POV’s. Because of this, I’d get interested in one character, say, Nyx and her bat brother, only to get tugged away from her and thrown into a dark and dismal cave scene.
I’m sure the book got better, but I expected an experienced author such as Rollins to try harder and pull his story together with more cohesion.

I quit at 100 pages, which I feel is being generous.

(Here are the opening two paragraphs of my review. The full review can be found at the attached link.)

It’s a mile wide and an inch deep, but The Starless Crown, James Rollins’ first foray into epic fantasy in about 15 years, gets the job done if all you’re looking for is pure escapism that doesn’t demand too much from your brain cells. The story takes place on a tidally locked world (and why not, those are all the rage these days), whose inhabitants live in a region they call the Crown, consisting of a few small continents along the day/night terminator. We follow the adventures of a ragtag group of heroes from disparate backgrounds, brought together under dangerous circumstances, to prevent an apocalyptic event that will see the moon itself crashing down from the sky in only a few short years.

If there were some kind of epic fantasy Costco where authors could buy discounted genre tropes by the pallet-load, Rollins would have cleaned the place out. We have our Chosen One protagonist, a child of prophecy upon whose shoulders the fate of the world rests. We have the black sheep prince who must prove himself, if only to himself. We have a disgraced knight grasping at the chance to right a past wrong. We have dark academia, thieves with hearts of gold, brother pitted against brother, deadly forests and fearsome monsters, and an ancient artifact of unknown origin that holds the key to all the mysteries. But I have to give Rollins credit, because at least he totally owns all of these choices and makes no pretense that he’s producing deathless literature. If a popcorn book it shall be, then fine. Here comes all the popcorn you could possibly eat.

This was one of my most anticipated reads of the year, so I'm sad to say I was a bit let down. The idea for this book is what really sucked me in and made me want to read it, but the set up in this novel was just too long. The exposition made me really bored, just waiting for something more to happen. I was also a bit...confused genre-wise? It was marketed to me, and online, as fantasy but it is--I would argue--much more sci-fi than fantasy. But the way it mixes doesn't serve the story in a meaningful way. I really didn't like the characters in this story, I was irritated by them and their personalities and backstories were so boring/flat. That is, perhaps, why the expository section of the work didn't work for me--it was mostly an intro to the characters and their motivations. The pace of this novel was good, even though the prose was a bit disjointed and stilted. It sort of read like a James Patterson thriller (prose-wise) in a fantasy setting which added to the weird tone of the book. I haven't read the author's backlist at all so I cannot compare this work to his previous work, but I would be interested in giving his fantasy or sci-fi another shot. Perhaps he just needs time to hammer out a narrative voice and genre!

“A fake fortune teller can be tolerated. But an authentic soothsayer should be shot on sight. Cassandra did not get half the kicking around she deserved.” At least according to Robert A. Heinlein in The Notebooks of Lazarus Long.

From that perspective, The Starless Crown is the story of Nyx, the authentic soothsayer – not that she would think of herself as such – receiving the full force of that kicking around. Deserved or not.

Definitely not – at least not in regards to anything that she personally has done. Not that she’s had a chance to do all that much when the story begins – as she seems to be just fifteen or thereabouts.

We meet her in school, in her astronomy class, as they study their “Urth’s” tidally locked rotation around the sun. A sun which they all refer to as the “Father Above,” the capital letters implied in the reverent way they speak of it. The Father Above is part of their pantheon of gods, along with the Mother Below (the Urth), the dark Daughter (the new moon) and the silvery Son (the full moon).

A catastrophe, shrouded in the mists of time, created the Urth that Nyx knows from the Earth that we now live on, locking our rotating world in a fixed position relative to the sun, so that only a relatively narrow circle is habitable for humans, in that relatively thin slice where the sun does not boil and its lack does not freeze. A circle that surrounds the Urth in just the same way that a crown surrounds the head of a monarch.

The story of The Starless Crown is Nyx’ story, as she breaks free of the shell she has been enclosed by her entire life. A story where she dreams of the destruction of her world – and the one thin chance where she might save something from the inevitable wreckage.

At a cost much higher than anyone is willing to pay.

Escape Rating A-: I listened to The Starless Crown from beginning to end. I enjoyed the listening – the narrator was very good and did an excellent job of differentiating the many, many voices of this story’s large cast.

At the same time, I didn’t feel compelled to finish it more quickly, so I didn’t pick up the ebook at all. The slower pace of listening worked better for me, because this is a slow burn kind of story. It takes a lot of chapters to get all the characters set up because they begin in far different locations under far different circumstances. We are seeing the plot come together from a great many disparate eyes.

And it takes a long time for all of those disparate – and sometimes desperate – parts to come together into the whole that is going to push this saga forward.

Part of my fascination with this story is that this is post-apocalyptic story that takes place in the far aftermath – an aftermath so far into the future that the people living it no longer recognize from whence they came – although we do.

Not that civilization as we know it wouldn’t break down and reform fairly quickly, messily and bloodily. In that sense it reminds me a bit of Aldiss’ Helliconia Trilogy, Stirling’s Emberverse starting with Dies the Fire, and the videogame Horizon Zero Dawn.

But the way the situation has evolved and devolved posits a corollary or an antonym to Clarke’s Law, the one that goes, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The Starless Crown is an example of something I’d want to call Harris’ Permutation if I were the person naming such things. Because this story is an example of a different principle, that “Any science sufficiently muddied by time or religious claptrap is indistinguishable from magic.”

They don’t know what they don’t know. Too much was lost in either the initial cataclysm or the long dark night that inevitably followed. What they’ve managed to find is now interpreted through a lens of religion, to which what we call science has become enslaved. And some of its methods are used to enslave others.

This is also a story of “Mother Nature bats last”. Whatever happened in the past that created the tidal lock, the coming moon fall feels like its inevitable result. The moon controls the tides. It can’t. So it keeps getting closer in order to try harder. Or something like that.

So we have a group that is not unlike the Fellowship of the Ring. A young seeress, a disgraced prince, a thief, an escaped slave, a living statue from the distant past on a quest to save their world – even if they don’t know it yet.

Arrayed against them are the forces of the powers that be. They’re not all evil, although some of them very much are. Some of them are willfully blind and some of them are just blind. There’s a lot of “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, but there’s a fair bit of “when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

But the villains are fascinatingly – if occasionally stomach turning-ly – twisted, the heroes are plucky to the max and the escapes are nail-biting, hair-raising, edge of the seat last minute scrapes. The reveal of the past, the fear in the present and the desperate hope of even a fractured future are handled in lush descriptions and buckets of regrets, recriminations and tears.

I have no idea how this band of misfits is going to get themselves and their world out of the mess they are in, but I look forward to finding out.

This new and unique world has so much to offer fantasy readers! The landscapes are as treacherous as they are beautiful, and the wildlife can turn on you in a heartbeat. There are environmental concerns in this world with major implications for everyone involved, which is really interesting to see. The Starless Crown s just a passionate, thrilling, and bold fantasy novel. One of my favorites I’ve read this year, without a doubt!
Full review to come on YouTube.

First l must thank NetGalley and the publisher for my eARC in exchange for my honest review. I admit I do not read as much fantasy as l use too. Saying this l know already I would read the follow up too The Starless Crown for sure. As with so many of the books I enjoy this has wonderfully strong characters, as well as an impending doom that we all hope we will avoid? James Rollins is best known to me as the writer of many fast paced thrillers, now l find out that I am enjoying a fantasy that though its start was slower, where l got to know the main characters and their backgrounds, I am absolutely sold on the tale. I am working out who is good vs evil, and cannot wait for book two of Moonfall.

I really enjoyed the characters, but was hoping for more growth from them. The world building is pretty good, but I can see where it will be expanded in upcoming books. Overall story was very enjoyable.

This is my first book to read by James Rollins. There's a lot of familiar fantasy tropes at play here but I think fans of the author will not be disappointed. It's a little long for my tastes but overall kept me intrigued.

Rollins, known for his thrillers, has returned to his original writing genre, that of Fantasy. Now, those who read mysteries are generally, not fans of Fantasy but if you are a Rollins fan, you might give this series a try. Granted, this first in a series spans 500 pages; just take your time reading.

Character development is a forte of Rollins’ as you will also find in this novel. You will follow a couple of main characters; Nyx, nearly blind who has visions of the future and Rhaif, a thief who escapes from prison, laboring in a mine. Nyx is soon running for her life because of her visions. And the adventure begins..

This book… incredible! I was sucked in immediately from chapter 1. The writing style is detailed and the world building is complex, so be ready for an intense read. The multi POVs from each character is one of my favorite parts—I love how the story builds separately for each character, and then comes together as the book progresses. I will also never get over this cover art—so beautiful.

Overall a really great read that I enjoyed quite a bit!