I'm so sorry but I had to DNF this book. I got about 3-4% through and it was just not clicking with me. I normally push through but I saw I had 16 hours left of it and I just could not invest that time. This book has the workings to be a great read but there is just so much of an info dump at the beginning that I found it so hard to focus on the story. This may be a good read for someone else but clearly not for me. I'm only sending this review through netgalley because I don't believe in rating books you DNF. I put a 1 star for the simple fact that I had to put a star rating.

Julius Caesar and Cleopatra are transported to a galaxy far far away in this debut space opera inspired by the famous lovers and the rise and fall of their ancient kingdoms.

Despite all the passion and betrayal, this is not a fast-paced book. Robin takes time to give depth and texture to the worlds, and the plot unfolds gradually, the pieces slowly falling into place. If you’re familiar with the story of Caesar and Cleopatra, the parallels will be readily apparent, but The Stars Undying easily stands on its own two feet.

This isn’t a book to inhale. It’s a book to savor, to sit with. It makes for perfect fireside or coffee shop reading. Let yourself sink into the story and allow it to transport you to far off worlds, past the stars undying. (Does that sound cheesy? It does, doesn’t it? Oh well. I’m cheesy, so that tracks.)

Oh, and the audiobook is incredibly well done. The dual narration is excellent. 🎧📖 Both Esther Wane and Tim Campbell deliver outstanding performances. Thank you to Orbit for my ALC and my beautiful finished copy.

Thank you so much to Netgalley and the publisher for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The first time I heard that this book was a retelling of Cleopatra and Caesers story, I was intrigued, but also concerned how the author will do it. Their story is so well known, so I wasn't sure that a retelling would bring something new. But you know what? It was amazing!!!

This is a space opera with political plotlines, high stakes, morally grey characters and subterfuge (what else could you expect from Caeser and Cleopatra?). While the characters are influenced by their historical counterparts, they aren't identical and still bring some new twists. That includes new names (Cleopatra=Gracia, Caeser=Ceirran) and even changes of gender where Marc Anthony becomes Anita (who is amazing, and I hope to see more of her in the sequel). I especially enjoyed Alexander the Great reimagining as Alekso - the God of Gracias culture, and how he affected the culture of various planets. The books is told from Gracias and Ceirrans POVs which helps the readers to understand their motivations and thinking better. In addition we can also see how their different cultures affect not only them personally, but their interactions.

This is a book with a very strong worldbuilding, characters and writing. I cannot wait to read the sequel!

4.5 stars. The Stars Undying by Emery Robin is a retelling of the story of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar in a sci-fi setting. Space opera? Retelling? Political intrigue? Sign me up!

The Stars Undying is a very fun and unique novel. You follow two POVs, Gracia (Cleopatra) and Ceirran (Caesar) throughout the novel and really get to care for the characters. I wish we saw more of Anita (Marc Antony) and Alekso (Alexander the Great). They were great characters who play important roles in the story, Gracia's interactions with both Ceirran and Anita were always great,

The story starts off sprinting with a fast pace where Gracia is on the run after her twin sister Arcelia steals her planet, her god, and her throne. Gracia teams up with Ceirran in order to get her planet Szayet back. There is a lot of great political intrigue in this novel that I loved. This is a book where you need to pay attention to all the details in order to understand all the moving pieces.

Strong writing. Strong main characters. Off pacing where it was either too slow or too fast at times. Strong political intrigue. I can't wait to read the next book!

Thank you to NetGalley and Hachette Audio, Orbit for an audiobook version in exchange for an honest review.

Audioarc dnf’d at 30%

The concept is really cool but I honestly just could not get engaged with it.

Gracia is heir to the throne in Szayet until her younger twin mounts a coup after their fathers death. Gracia fights to take her city back until she is finally forced to flee. She falls in league with Ceirran, Commander of the interstellar Empire of Ceiao. Told in dual perspectives, watch the adventures and affair of Gracia and Ceirran play out among the stars.

I actually know very little about the story of Cleopatra and Caesar so I can’t tell you anything about how closely inspired it is. In the style of space operas, the stakes are on a grand scheme and there is a cult like religious system going on.

Gracia is a very apathetic main character. Even when intense things are happening around her, she seems to be experiencing it in an out of body sort of way. This made it really hard to be engaged in her chapters or even care what’s happening to her.

The relationship with Ceirran is very sudden, like they’re introduced and then they’re in bed. Other than Ceirran’s own empire building motivations, it’s hard to see what is motivating him to help Gracia.

I can’t say either of these narrators will be a favorite for me going forward. Ceirran’s narrator was better but the voices he used for other people were annoying. Gracia’s narrator had a very posh British mid-Atlantic kind of accent that was just a bit too pretentious to enjoy.

I might come back to this book at some point because I really like space operas as a genre and I want to like this book but these are the least relatable main characters and they’re too annoying for me at this time.

Aunque me gusta explorar otras mitologías o sucesos históricos que sean desconocidas para mí, siempre resulta agradable volver a terrenos más conocidos que nos resulten cómodos, como este retelling de la historia de Cleopatra de manos de Emery Robin, aunque en este caso se limita a su relación con Julio César, imagino que la parte de Marco Antonio quedará para futuras entregas. En el libro ya aparece su personaje, esta vez encarnado en mujer, pero su participación sin duda alguna será más importante en un futuro.


The Stars Undying juega muy bien sus cartas al situar el relato en el espacio, pero manteniendo muchos acontecimientos reconocibles para el gran público, sean apócrifos o reales. La escena de la alfombra, el enfrentamiento con su hermano por la sucesión o su visita a Roma. Pero también introduce cambios que son muy atractivos como cambiar a su hermano por una hermana gemela, con todo lo que ello conlleva.

Sin duda, la mayor aportación de la autora es la inclusión de la perla, una inteligencia artificial que supuestamente almacena el alma y la personalidad de Alejandro Magno, referencia imprescindible en la dinastía ptolemaica. En el planeta Szayet, el equivalente de Egipto, se le considera un dios y al portador de la perla, su Oráculo. Robin juega mucho a dejar a la interpretación del lector si nos hallamos realmente ante la personificación de Alejandro o ante una inteligencia artificial que se hace pasar por él.

Cuando entra en escena Matheus Ceirran, el Julio César de esta realidad, todo lo que estaba en un equilibrio bastante precario, acaba patas arriba. La relación entre Ceirran y Altagracia es pasional e intelectual a la vez, un duelo de personalidades y ambiciones muy atractivo. ¿Es la búsqueda de la inmortalidad algo posible y deseable?

The Stars Undying tiene varios niveles de lectura, dependiendo del conocimiento que de esa parte de la historia tenga el lector. Pero creo que es perfectamente disfrutable sea cual sea ese nivel, lo cual es un punto a favor de la propia obra.

Además, el formato en el que yo he tenido acceso al libro es audiolibro y he de decir que, si bien el trabajo de Esther Wane es encomiable, el de Tim Campbell es de quitarse el sombrero. Pocas voces son capaces de transmitir la emoción y el saber estar de un personaje maduro como Ceirran, con un empaque y una dicción que acarician el oído del lector. Un trabajo excelente.

Por desgracia, ahora nos toca esperar a la siguiente parte de la saga Empire without End, para saber cómo continúan las existencias de los personajes.

4,5 stars

"In the first year of the Thirty-Third Dynasty, when He came to the planet where I was born and made of it a wasteland for glory's sake, my ten-times-great-grandfather's king and lover, Alekso Undying, built on the ruins of the gods who had lived before Him Alectelo, the City of Endless Pearl, the Bride of Szayet, the Star of the Swordbelt Arm, the Ever-Living God's Empty Grave.

He caught fever and filled that grave, ten months later. You can't believe in names."

The Stars Undying is, among other things, about a pearl, or, I should say, the Pearl, a computer that contains the immortal soul of Alekso Undying, and that makes its wearer his prophet and the Oracle of Szayet. I start with this because as a novel, The Stars Undying feels to me much like the pearl around which so much of its story revolves. For one, this novel is a thing of beauty: it is the product of brilliant work, and I know this because it is apparent on every page. The writing is polished, poised, elegant; it has a kind of classic quality to it that makes it feel at once historical and timeless. More to the point, it's genuinely some of the most impressive writing I've encountered in an SFF novel in recent memory.

Polished and elegant it may be, but The Stars Undying is, also like its Pearl, far from simple or straightforward. It gives with one hand and withholds with the other; gives under the guise of withholding, or else withholds under the guise of giving. It's a novel that doesn't tip its hand--not for the sake of some kind of contrived suspense, but because of the very nature of its world, and of the kind of story that's being told in that world. That is, if the novel doesn't tip its hand, it's because its characters don't. What they say and do is subject to the ever-present power dynamics of their world, to the way power--of the person, of the ideology, of the empire--warps everything around it so that what might have been straight becomes circuitous, so that characters have to tread carefully, and so that we have to read their silences as carefully as their utterances. And this power operates within as much as it does without: caught in these webs of power, the characters are not any less complex to themselves as they are to us.

"It has been a long time since that night, when I lay in the dark between Matheus Ceirran and the image of my god. I have thought of it often since, trying to make sense of it, of how vividly it stands out in my recollection. As I am telling these memories to you, I am turning them over in my hands, I am holding them up to the light. It is in memory that I am trying to find some kind of truth, if truth is anywhere to be found."

All of this is to say, The Stars Undying is a book that, like its Pearl, is comprised of many accounts: Gracia's, Ceirran's, Anita's--its three principal characters--but also Szayet's and Ciao's accounts, the accounts of empire and all the history and storytelling that is attendant to it. It's an incredibly multilayered and rich novel, and the way it slowly and intentionally develops those layers is just exquisite (in the moment, but also, and perhaps especially, in retrospect). The word I keep reaching for here is simmering: there is so much bubbling beneath the surface of this story, some of which breaks its surface by the end, and some of which remains buried, subtext left to carefully put together based on what we know of these characters and their dynamics.

What I love most about this novel is, simply, how much it trusts its reader. There were so many points while reading it that I wanted something--a feeling, a suspicion, a thought--to be made explicit, to be specifically explained and justified--but that's not what I got, and I loved it. I loved that this book didn't give me what I wanted, but made me work for it. The Stars Undying is a novel that develops its characters--and, by extension, lets you work to decode them--by way of conversations. And there are some truly stunning scenes here: complex and thorny and compelling moments between these characters, all of whom are already fleshed out and alive in their own right. (Ceirran and Gracia? Endlessly fascinating. Gracia and Anita? ELECTRIC. Ceirran and Anita? So surprising.) You know these characters, but you do not quite grasp them; they are many things, but they are not reducible to any one thing. And that is such a feat on Emery Robin's part: to craft characters who both reward and repel your efforts to know them, who are always both familiar and strange. Needless to say, I was utterly drawn in.

All this, and I haven't even touched on the worldbuilding yet, which is remarkable and everything you could ever want in an SFF novel, really. What stands out in particular is the sheer level of detail that animates this world. Szayet and Ceiao are suffused with so much life: they come with their own their own--sometimes distinct, sometimes overlapping--histories, cultures, ideologies, religions (or lack thereof), architecture, geographies, resources, languages. And it's not just that you know them, it's that you understand why they are the way that they are: the histories that animate their ideologies, the geographies that shape their economies, the sociopolitics that govern, and justify, the power they wield and the power they seek.

(And I haven't even mentioned the whole Cleopatra-and-Julius-Caesar retelling aspect of this because I only know the barest of barebones about that history and so can't really speak to how it was incorporated into the novel. But if this book is incredible without me knowing anything about what it's retelling then I can only imagine how good it is when you're actually familiar with its historical basis--which I am definitely planning on brushing up on when I reread this.)

I honestly don't know what else I can say about this book: The Stars Undying is a singular novel, and I absolutely adored it. I was already 100% going to read its sequel, but god, after that brilliant ending, nothing can come between me and that second book.

Thank you so much to Orbit for providing me with an e-ARC of this via NetGalley!

Thank you so much to Netgalley and the publisher for a free ALC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Because this was compared to both Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice AND Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire (both my favorite books of all time), it's safe to say this book was my most anticipated release of 2022. I had expected it to be an easy five-star, but unfortunately it was only a 4-star for me.

I thoroughly enjoyed the political intrigue in this book. Of course, being a retelling of Caesar and Cleopatra's stories, it was bound to have a lot of intertwining politics, and that was masterfully done. The writing was beautiful as well, and I especially found the conversations had about religion in the world Robin built to be especially interesting and well-done.

However, I found the characters to be quite wooden, and I didn't feel as if I was rooting for them until about 75% through the book - which was way too late for me, because I am a character driven reader. So, even though the plot was expertly done and I wanted to know what happened next, the characters just didn't hold my interest. The book was also very slow-moving. It took a long while for me to become interested in the plot itself.

As far as the audiobook was concerned, I liked that there were two narrators, one for Ceirran and one for Gracia. All in all, a good space opera that I would recommend for people looking to sink their teeth into a lot of political intrigue, but not one that I would re-read anytime soon.