The plot mostly centers on a fourteen-year-old girl named Nyx, a foundling at a cloistered academy on a world which is half in sunlight and half in darkness all the time (but tilted on its axis, so there are habitable zones for humans at the poles). It’s over 500 pages long it’s got a map it assembles a varied fellowship it brims with lore it serves up a series of MacGuffins (including one on the very last page) it promises sequels. It’s a dutifully full-dress thing, dedicated to Terry Brooks and sporting a cover blurb by him.
There’s been a profusion of novels in the intervening fifteen years, but this new book by Rollins, The Starless Crown (rumored to be the first in a series called “Moon Fall”), marks his at-long-last return to the genre that launched his career. But alongside some of those early novels were creatures of a very different sort: big, sprawling airport thrillers like Excavation, Ice Hunt, and especially his terrific 2002 Amazonia. Longtime fans of James Rollins will remember his first forays into the writing of high fantasy, well over a decade ago: the “Banned and the Banished” series and the “Godslayer” books, written under the name James Clemens, were classic examples of the genre and might have hinted at a long future career mining that vein.
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