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2.0
Starfall (The Fables of Chaos Book 1)
ByPublisher Description
8,000 years ago, a great Cataclysm threatened all life on Eos. Its moon was fractured and strewn across the night sky, the oceans shifted and swallowed the lands, and the peoples of Eos were forced to fight against other-wordly horrors as reality itself was torn asunder. Since then, the peoples of Eos have long-forgotten their dark history, until signs of a new Cataclysm begin to appear once again...
It began with the bleeding star. A bright red streak across the sky that some viewed as a sign of fortune, others as a stark omen of bloodshed.
The secretive Magisters of the Grand Repository are hunted down and slaughtered by unknown forces. The seas turn to blood, and fresh corpses go missing in battle. Peasant children are lured away by strange, ghoulish whispers into the woods, never to be seen again.
Katryna Bower, the runaway daughter of King Giliam Bower, is forced to return home after her mother dies suddenly and father is poisoned. Old traumas run deep however, and Katryna must confront her painful past and estranged family before she can uncover the twisted plot against her House.
King Emery Blacktree agrees to end a bitter border dispute with the House Seynard by marrying his only daughter to the despisable Seynard prince. Emery's objective is to maintain peace, but all is quickly shattered at the royal wedding as his wife's fears consume her and slanderous secrets are revealed. How far will Emery go to avoid a civil war?
Up north, Tomas and Rilan, two naive peasant boys from a small village, are conscripted into the army of the Broken Coast, and thrown into the horrors of an invasion by a foreign empire. War isn't the only threat they will face, as they fight alongside an unforgiving captain and his barbaric men on a dangerous mission that will lead them into the very path of the next Cataclysm and a strange girl who may hold all the answers.
It began with the bleeding star. A bright red streak across the sky that some viewed as a sign of fortune, others as a stark omen of bloodshed.
The secretive Magisters of the Grand Repository are hunted down and slaughtered by unknown forces. The seas turn to blood, and fresh corpses go missing in battle. Peasant children are lured away by strange, ghoulish whispers into the woods, never to be seen again.
Katryna Bower, the runaway daughter of King Giliam Bower, is forced to return home after her mother dies suddenly and father is poisoned. Old traumas run deep however, and Katryna must confront her painful past and estranged family before she can uncover the twisted plot against her House.
King Emery Blacktree agrees to end a bitter border dispute with the House Seynard by marrying his only daughter to the despisable Seynard prince. Emery's objective is to maintain peace, but all is quickly shattered at the royal wedding as his wife's fears consume her and slanderous secrets are revealed. How far will Emery go to avoid a civil war?
Up north, Tomas and Rilan, two naive peasant boys from a small village, are conscripted into the army of the Broken Coast, and thrown into the horrors of an invasion by a foreign empire. War isn't the only threat they will face, as they fight alongside an unforgiving captain and his barbaric men on a dangerous mission that will lead them into the very path of the next Cataclysm and a strange girl who may hold all the answers.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesStarfall (The Fables of Chaos Book 1) Reviews
2.0
“Rating: C+
Oof.
Alyria is a land divided and ruled by multiple kingdoms. Amongst the political turmoil and intricacies of the kingdom, a catastrophic event is occurring as a comet seems to be passing the planet. Several characters have a perspective in this book:
- Katryna, an exiled princess returning home
- Tomas, a villager conscripted as a soldier
- Wesley, the next in line for the throne of another kingdom
And multiple other side characters who sort of supplement the main three.
I was expecting a grimdark fantasy with epic propotions but it sort of stays low-level on the ground with really simplistic writing contrasted poorly with suddenly graphic and violent scenes like battles, corpses, plague and illness and sexual violence. I was kind of surprised that a queer author and survivor would actually write sexual violence into their own book but that was their choice, horrid as it was. Grimdark doesn't have to mean rape but babby's first grimdark must. The book is also divided into 4 acts, but nothing really is moved that far along to tell me why it even needed to be split since we return to the exact same timeline when the next act begins, with the exact same amount of monsters and fucked-uped-ness.
There are also "Interlude" chapters which I thought were quite good but I didn't think they were very subtle when it came to dropping worldbuilding hints. Plus none of them played into the story at all. We never saw anyone who was in a side story become relevant in any of the main story and nothing they did had any impact on the characters in the main storyline at all. It could have just been a side novella or even the interlude chapters could have been used to move the plot along from a different perspective or to drop backstory of our protagonists.
As I got further into the book, I kept wondering when it was going to get good, but I just realised it was just going to keep doing the same thing it did from the start - switch POVs moving the story forward but never really making me care for anyone in the book. Especially towards the end, there were spelling and punctuation errors, repeated words and seemingly character-breaking dialogue. Everyone in this book was suddenly superbly unhinged and psychotic and it didn't seem to make sense except the author wanted to drive home his grimdark story tag. To be honest, there are still good people in dark stories, and I really struggled to see who that was. I did think Katryna's story was the most compelling and I liked her backstory as well. I was interested by Tomas but I found his chapters really clunky especially towards the middle end of the book.
I was honestly quite disappointed with this one and wish it had met my expectations.”
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