The Fall is All There Is was the 6th place finalist in BBNYA 2024!
About BBNYA
BBNYA is a yearly competition where book bloggers from all over the world read and score books written by indie authors, ending with 15 finalists (16 in 2024) and one overall winner.
If you want some more information about BBNYA, check out the BBNYA Website https://www.bbnya.com/ or take a peek over on Twitter @BBNYA_Official. BBNYA is brought to you in association with the book blogger support group @The_WriteReads.
Book Details
Length: 415 Pages
Genre: Fantasy, Science Fiction
Age Category: Adult
Date Published: November 7, 2022
Amazon Link: https://amzn.eu/d/9c2iAFG (UK) https://a.co/d/g89AK7f (USA) https://a.co/d/iRt6abC (Canada)
Goodreads Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/220262507-the-fall-is-all-there-is
The Story Graph Link: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/49172538-7e0a-4599-b497-5b04f9543d33
Blurb
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.
Petre is a runaway prince who relies on painful injections to teach his body how to fight. His mother was the first one to administer these injections when he was a child, as she was a master of corpse technology. Now, even as he avoids and hides away from his family, he relies on other scientists to give him his regular doses. Now, his family is dragging him back into their political drama as his sister is poised to be crowned queen, and his two other siblings are vying for his support for their own goals. Petre was always the black sheep of the quadruplets. Autistic, reliant on injections to function, and never fitting in to the world of politics and royalty. But now, it is up to him to steer decisions to shape the future of his family’s kingdom.
Being in Petre’s mind for the entirety of this story was more interesting than I thought it would be. As someone with several autistic family members, I’ve always wanted to read a story from a perspective similar to theirs. This was one of the closest that I’ve ever felt to doing so. Petre was impulsive. He was often confused in conversations, missing social cues, which meant that, as the reader, we didn’t always fully understand what was going on either. However, he was also fiercely determined to remain independent and escape the world of politics and manipulation as soon as possible. He had created a life for himself that he was happy with, and although he missed some aspects of his family, he wasn’t willing to give up that life yet. Reading his relationship with each of his siblings was very satisfying, as you see their POV of the events that led Petre to run away and get a more complete picture of what life was like for these royal quadruplets. All these characters felt human, imperfect, yet worthy of their space in this universe.
The technologies of this universe were confusing yet intriguing. Corpse technology, humans or animals who have been made more powerful by combining metal and robotics into their bodies, but at what true cost? Most of this book wasn’t too gory for me to enjoy, but some scenes had me genuinely wincing or feeling a little sick. Seeing everything from Petre’s POV puts things into perspective. You’re not seeing the harshness of this world from a third-person view, but from the perspective of the very human character Petre. His emotions become yours. His successes, failures, and horrors become real.
The only thing that I struggled with sometimes in this book was the pacing. It took me a little while to get into the story and become invested in Petre as a protagonist, but once things picked up, I found myself flying through the pages. Take your time and immerse yourself in the world of The Fall Is All There Is. There’s a lot to explore here.
I would recommend this to anyone looking for a new science fiction, grimdark, or fantasy series to enjoy.
Overall Rating: 4 out of 5 books.
Author Bio
C.M. Caplan is the author of the SPFBO 9, BBNYA, and Indie Ink Awards Finalist, The Fall Is All There Is. He’s a quadruplet (yes, really), autistic, and has a degree in creative writing. If you enjoy his books, you can rate them on Goodreads and Amazon.
Wow, this was a great review!