Review of "The Starless Crown" by James Rollins

I received an ARC of this book from Tor in exchange for an honest review.

December was a long month for me this year, and The Starless Crown was a satisfying popcorn book to sit down with over the "dead week" between Christmas and New Years. While the story doesn't feel especially original, Rollins writes good action scenes, and keeps the plot moving briskly enough for the book to feel engaging. The classic author's trick of switching points of view right as the action starts to get good is on full display in the first half, with cliffhanger after cliffhanger followed by a jump-cut to another character, but even though I knew what was coming I was still hooked. As the book goes on, it becomes clear that while the characters might all end up in the same place by the end, the major puzzles Rollins lays out won't be resolved until a sequel (or sequels--I'm not sure, but experience leads me to expect a trilogy), which lowered the stakes significantly and made the concluding battle feel much less satisfying. Of the three protagonists--Nyx, Rhaif, and Kanthe--only Rhaif's arc comes to a satisfying conclusion. Nyx feels under-explored after a promising beginning, with a major trait (discussed in the spoilers below) discarded after the opening chapters in favor of a more run-of-the-mill hero's journey. Kanthe doesn't have enough time to change, remaining relatively static as a character after an initial misdirect when he is first introduced. Rhaif is the only protagonist who grows over the course of the book and is still left with room to explore revelations about his past in the sequels, making him more interesting than the other two in my view. Rollins does better writing the big action set-pieces in the second half of the book, giving urgency to the protagonists' flight across a remote mountain range and then painting a vivid picture of a steampunk-like conflict fought between ground forces and enemy airships. For spoiler-related reasons, much of the world is left unexplored, which leaves room for plenty more surprises as the series unfolds, but given this book's reliance on classic fantasy elements I'm unsure how many of those twists will be genuinely unexpected to a seasoned reader. Fans of the Brandon Sanderson school of fantasy--puzzles to unravel, an ever-expanding cast, and an avalanche of revelations in the last third of the book--will find much to enjoy. Overall The Starless Crown makes for a good weekend's entertainment, but not much more.

Three out of five stars. I'm curious to see whether the second book manages to take these ideas in a more original direction, but won't be waiting with bated breath.

A review with spoilers follows below! Read no further unless you want to be spoiled!

After reading Charlie Jane Anders's The City in the Middle of the Night, the signs of a story told on a tidally-locked planet were easy to find, and The Starless Crown makes no real secret of the fact that it is set on a future Earth that has (somehow) become tidally locked. Rollins may have been trying for a novel combination of science fiction and fantasy elements, and I expect the relics of whatever future civilization existed on Earth before the tidal-locking occurred to play a large role in the series going forward. However, limiting the first book to a standard fantasy setting while hinting at the larger science-fictional world ultimately means that neither story is realized especially well. In the fantasy world, Nyx's initial mostly-blindness is quickly cured, and after a few chapters in which she makes interesting remarks about learning to navigate a world with full sight for the first time, she pays little attention to this change for the rest of the book. Setting aside broader issues of disability and its portrayal in fiction, I found this change disappointing, since it left Nyx as just another Chosen One with a Dark Past. Many of the other details of the protagonists' adventures are classic elements of the genre, from the escape across the mountains to the Wise Forest Tribe to the menacing but ultimately helpful pirate ally. With the tidal locking largely relegated to background information, and the identity of the planet as Future Earth never really in doubt, there isn't enough mystery in the science fiction portion to elevate the book beyond these tropes. Naming the habitable band between heat and cold the Crown (and remarking on the difficulty of seeing stars from the glare of the sun) is a clever touch, but unlike The City, little is done with the regions beyond the Crown in a move that feels like intentional stalling until the sequel. While many of the character moments fell flat, the highlight of the book for me was the airship battle at the end, where Rollins's skills as a thriller writer felt like they had been put to good use. As I said above, this is a good popcorn book, and worth picking up at your local library, but it has little philosophical heft and fails to reach beyond the now-well-known science-fantasy conceit of a future Earth that resembles our past.