Reviews

What is conquest, and what is empire, and what is religion? These are questions The Stars Undying flirts with, but is uninterested in fully answering. Instead, it spends most of its words detailing the lives of Cleopatra, Caesar, and Mark Antony in some reincarnated mode that is both slavish to detail-- multiple facts about these historical figures are awkwardly replicated in this SciFi adventure even when it's unnecessary to the plot-- and totally uncomprehending of the historical figures real weight. The things that are changed barely make sense at first, until I realized the intention was to make these figures less complicated, more consumable, more sympathetic, less problematic.

Was Caesar a tyrant who ended the last vestiges of republicanism in ancient Rome? Was there anything worth saving in Rome's horrible bloodbath of an empire? Was Egypt culpable in these wars? Was its sovereignty truly worth preserving when it was ruled over by a foreign queen? These are questions the book is aware of, but doggedly ignores.

It also makes the odd choice to obscure and deemphasize the historically significant Roman women of the period. Servilia and Aurelia are dead, Calpurnia is gender-bent, Fulvia is declawed, but this is okay because... Antony is a girl, and Brutus is nonbinary, and Cato and Pompey are also women? Hurray.

I rarely ask for books to be longer. In general I think they should be shorter. This book's pacing was incredibly fast and deftly balanced! But in the service of that rapidity, it left out a great amount of detail, meaning, and nuance. The book's focus is clearly on the romance, the great imperial saga, the tragedy and the agony, the ambition and the grace! But for what? These things don't exist without context, and the writing relies on the preexisting template (Antony and Cleopatra and the end of the late Republican period in Rome) for those details. In trying to balance both, it serves neither.

Here is a statement the book does not make, though it delves constantly into the idea of death and immortality: The dead, especially the ancient dead, are symbols to us. What we say about them says more about us than them. What this book says about the ancient dead is that they are glorious, fascinating, and romantic.

But it doesn't know why.