Blog Tour Review - The Fall Is All There Is by C.M. Caplan

 Blog Tour Review - The Fall Is All There Is by C.M. Caplan

All Petre Mercy wanted was a good old-fashioned dramatic exit from his life as a prince. But it's been five years since he fled home on a cyborg horse. Now the King—his Dad—is dead—and Petre has to decide which heir to pledge his thyroid-powered sword to.

As the youngest in a set of quadruplets, he’s all too aware that the line of succession is murky. His siblings are on the precipice of power grabs, and each of them want him to pick their side.

If Petre has any hope of preventing civil war, he'll have to avoid one sibling who wants to take him hostage, win back another’s trust after years of rivalry and resentment, and get an audience with a sister he's been avoiding for five years.

Before he knows it, he's plunged himself into a web of intrigue and a world of strange, unnatural inventions just to get to her doorstep.

Family reunions can be a special form of torture.

The Fall Is All There Is is one of the books I read in an early round of the Book Bloggers' Novel of the Year Award last year, where I got to read the first two thousand words and had to score it based on that. The introduction really intrigued me, with a blend of sci-fi tech and fantasy world, and its hints of a deeper political situation, missing heirs and demands coming from court. I scored it highly, and when it reached the finals I requested it again, full length this time.

It didn't disappoint! The world building here is really excellent. There's a post-apocalyptic feel to a lot of the technology, the feeling of a world that has fallen apart and been rebuilt, but it's all done in a clever and subtle way that leaves you with a fascinating blend of technology and traditional fantasy tropes.

There are high stakes games being played too, games, if you will, of thrones and who gets to sit on them. This spins out really well, but one aspect I loved about it is how it handles the people behind the games, their personal doubts and thoughts. There's a deeply human element to the politicking that works very well. The characters have a lot of depth to them, particularly Petre. This is where The Fall Is All There Is really impressed me. Without spelling it out too explicitly, as this is a fantasy novel, Petre is autistic. His mother used dark sciences to help him, and it forms a large part of his personality and behaviour. I thought the autism representation was really well done. It doesn't fall into the "It's your superpower" trap so often misused in media, but it does have its advantages as well as its disadvantages and it certainly affects how his family have seen him and treated him in different, complex ways. It's not something I remember seeing in a book like this, and it really impressed me. 

Overall, The Fall is All There Is was an exciting and fascinating story with deep, complex characters. I loved it!

The Fall Is All There Is by C.M. Caplan is out now. I was given an ebook copy as part of the BBNYA 2024.

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