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sebbie's review against another edition
3.0
I liked the story a lot, but there was too much recapping, and too much background descriptions of the world. I don't think new readers will generally drop in this late, so this made for an irritating reading experience.
ineffablebob's review against another edition
4.0
Same style as the other Emberverse books and as well-written, but moves really slowly. Not too surprising for first in a new series, but might be a good idea to wait until the next book or two is out to read this one.
hamiltwan's review against another edition
3.0
This is the eleventh book in the series and the start of the third generation's plotline. If you liked the others, you'll probably want to read this one, although it is clearly mostly setup: introducing new characters and potential plots, so not a ton of action bit probably necessary for the series.
essemmarr's review against another edition
2.0
The Change. A great Deus Ex Apocalyptica for a now quite long-running series of books. A long-running series of books that, for the middle run, I struggled with continuing to read.
I liked the first few books very much; going through the actual horrors of The Change and watching tiny bands of devastated survivors struggle to establish new societies and fight off their enemies was very enjoyable.
Then, the Ren Faire nonsense started becoming increasingly prominent and I enjoyed it less and less. This is a personal thing; I just generally don't dig fantasy, magic, any of that, and would have happily enjoyed reading about the neo-medieval + understanding germ theory and having bicycles world that was being established. But magic swords and seers and demons all started becoming prominent.
Stirling lost me for a while, though once a year or so I would begrudgingly zip through the latest release in the series, reading the occasional paragraph aloud to my wife until I could actually hear her eyes roll and she started Googling divorce lawyers...
All of that said, I'm enjoying this... what I'll refer to as Third Generation series a bit more. We're a few generations into The Change. Honestly, Game of Thrones (TV show, not the turgid doorstop of a book series) has opened me open a little to fantasy in general, though The Change could stand to borrow a little more of the latter's much more believable grittiness and shittiness of humanity rather than the pretty stark black and white world it presents. So I'm more accepting of the premise that magic-y stuff exists, though lightly outside of the actual ruler of Montival and their sword and the bad guys (formerly CUT, now without even a name throughout an entire goddamned book because we haven't even really MET them yet but hey, gotta churn one of these out a year... do I fear some creeping Turtledove-ism? Maybe). And while I still find the lack of environmental impact of the complete collapse of the industrial world (aside from literally one toss-off sentence about how Pacific fish might not be super-safe to eat near the shores of dead Seattle, c'mon now) nor much mention of just how much shit would still be lying around even 50 years after The Change... I dunno. Stirling is a pretty compelling world builder, and now the series is taking place in entirely his own creation instead of a mix of our time and his new one, and it generally works.
I like the expanded scope he's setting up this new series (or three) to take place in; the chapter featuring "King Birmo", a VERY thinly-veiled future version of contemporary author John Birmingham (who is just outstanding himself, if you haven't read him or somehow don't follow him on Twitter) and describing what's going on in post-Change Australia is delightful, even if it sets us up for a whopping zero bit of followup (though I fully expect we're not done with Australia yet, just might be another book or two before we get there).
Likewise, the extended sections covering Queen Reiko's past and how Japan got through The Change are thoroughly enjoyable as well.
That said, this book is all setup for what I imagine will be four-five books before we're all said and done. Every generation must have its Quest, in the post-Change world, and they are not tales told quickly.
The addition of non-American (Montival-an?) elements goes a long way towards squashing the incessant dopey medieval English/Scottish/Irish-isms that were about all we got in the middle books of the series; now I can at least pretty much glaze over the excessive descriptions of what a McClintock is wearing or what feast a Mackenzie is eating or yaaaaaaaawn... this is Stirling's big weakness, and he indulges the SHIT out of it in this book, as he has in every preceding one as well. You either like it or you don't; I don't love it but can get past it.
Stirling's love of descriptive writing serves him better with the military side of things, not that there's much of that in this entry.
The key thing to know about The Golden Princess, as a book, is this: It's ALL setup for future books.
And that's fine, but know that going in. If you're expecting a typical self-contained three-arc genre action novel, you'll be disappointed; there's no payoff at all, not even really a cliffhanger because no action really occurs; we're being introduced to a wide new set of characters in great detail, and the nature of what they'll have to accomplish is being woven into detail, but THAT'S IT in this particular book. You're committing to reading a bunch more over the next few years so if that kind of commitment is off-putting, don't get started).
That said, Stirling's batting average over his entire career, for me, is quite high, and he's a stellar world-builder who can really give the reader a sense of the world being acted in, so I don't mind that an entire not-short novel was spent here on that sort of thing at the expense of anything actually happening. I think this new Quest for this new generation is going to be entertaining, and it sounds like a good chunk of the early action is going to take us through post-Change Los Angeles and Southern California, which should be great fun. And Birmo's Australia looms in the background, waiting to be looped into the story, and I'm sure that will be as crazily fun as Birmo's own writing is in THIS timeline.
So, if you've already been enjoying The Change series, you'll probably enjoy this. If you're daunted by how big this series is already, you can safely start here because it's basically a whole new story at this point, and there's more than enough background on how we got here presented in this volume to get you up to speed.
I just hope the payoff is worth the investment, because I can already tell this series is going to weigh in a quite a few thousand pages when it's all said and done.
I liked the first few books very much; going through the actual horrors of The Change and watching tiny bands of devastated survivors struggle to establish new societies and fight off their enemies was very enjoyable.
Then, the Ren Faire nonsense started becoming increasingly prominent and I enjoyed it less and less. This is a personal thing; I just generally don't dig fantasy, magic, any of that, and would have happily enjoyed reading about the neo-medieval + understanding germ theory and having bicycles world that was being established. But magic swords and seers and demons all started becoming prominent.
Stirling lost me for a while, though once a year or so I would begrudgingly zip through the latest release in the series, reading the occasional paragraph aloud to my wife until I could actually hear her eyes roll and she started Googling divorce lawyers...
All of that said, I'm enjoying this... what I'll refer to as Third Generation series a bit more. We're a few generations into The Change. Honestly, Game of Thrones (TV show, not the turgid doorstop of a book series) has opened me open a little to fantasy in general, though The Change could stand to borrow a little more of the latter's much more believable grittiness and shittiness of humanity rather than the pretty stark black and white world it presents. So I'm more accepting of the premise that magic-y stuff exists, though lightly outside of the actual ruler of Montival and their sword and the bad guys (formerly CUT, now without even a name throughout an entire goddamned book because we haven't even really MET them yet but hey, gotta churn one of these out a year... do I fear some creeping Turtledove-ism? Maybe). And while I still find the lack of environmental impact of the complete collapse of the industrial world (aside from literally one toss-off sentence about how Pacific fish might not be super-safe to eat near the shores of dead Seattle, c'mon now) nor much mention of just how much shit would still be lying around even 50 years after The Change... I dunno. Stirling is a pretty compelling world builder, and now the series is taking place in entirely his own creation instead of a mix of our time and his new one, and it generally works.
I like the expanded scope he's setting up this new series (or three) to take place in; the chapter featuring "King Birmo", a VERY thinly-veiled future version of contemporary author John Birmingham (who is just outstanding himself, if you haven't read him or somehow don't follow him on Twitter) and describing what's going on in post-Change Australia is delightful, even if it sets us up for a whopping zero bit of followup (though I fully expect we're not done with Australia yet, just might be another book or two before we get there).
Likewise, the extended sections covering Queen Reiko's past and how Japan got through The Change are thoroughly enjoyable as well.
That said, this book is all setup for what I imagine will be four-five books before we're all said and done. Every generation must have its Quest, in the post-Change world, and they are not tales told quickly.
The addition of non-American (Montival-an?) elements goes a long way towards squashing the incessant dopey medieval English/Scottish/Irish-isms that were about all we got in the middle books of the series; now I can at least pretty much glaze over the excessive descriptions of what a McClintock is wearing or what feast a Mackenzie is eating or yaaaaaaaawn... this is Stirling's big weakness, and he indulges the SHIT out of it in this book, as he has in every preceding one as well. You either like it or you don't; I don't love it but can get past it.
Stirling's love of descriptive writing serves him better with the military side of things, not that there's much of that in this entry.
The key thing to know about The Golden Princess, as a book, is this: It's ALL setup for future books.
And that's fine, but know that going in. If you're expecting a typical self-contained three-arc genre action novel, you'll be disappointed; there's no payoff at all, not even really a cliffhanger because no action really occurs; we're being introduced to a wide new set of characters in great detail, and the nature of what they'll have to accomplish is being woven into detail, but THAT'S IT in this particular book. You're committing to reading a bunch more over the next few years so if that kind of commitment is off-putting, don't get started).
That said, Stirling's batting average over his entire career, for me, is quite high, and he's a stellar world-builder who can really give the reader a sense of the world being acted in, so I don't mind that an entire not-short novel was spent here on that sort of thing at the expense of anything actually happening. I think this new Quest for this new generation is going to be entertaining, and it sounds like a good chunk of the early action is going to take us through post-Change Los Angeles and Southern California, which should be great fun. And Birmo's Australia looms in the background, waiting to be looped into the story, and I'm sure that will be as crazily fun as Birmo's own writing is in THIS timeline.
So, if you've already been enjoying The Change series, you'll probably enjoy this. If you're daunted by how big this series is already, you can safely start here because it's basically a whole new story at this point, and there's more than enough background on how we got here presented in this volume to get you up to speed.
I just hope the payoff is worth the investment, because I can already tell this series is going to weigh in a quite a few thousand pages when it's all said and done.
antij's review against another edition
2.0
The major problem with this series has been its slow pace. I was ok with it taking its time, especially when they were crossing the country meeting new people and cultures every hundred pages or so, but the so-called "War of the Prophet" killed any momentum this series had. I was wiling to give this series one more chance as it looked that it could be going off into an interesting direction, and while it could still be going in that direction the pace it's getting there is way too slow for me. If anything this book feels incredibly indulgent. If I was being polite, I would say that the author was mostly interested in his world building, but a lot of times it just feels feels like he wants to share with us all the research that he's done. I don't need to know the minutiae in the differences between the japanese feudal system and the european feudal system. The final chapter of the book really doesn't need to be spending pages discussing the difference between the characters' fighting styles, especially when there's no more fights in the book. A chapter was devoted to an Australian king who doesn't make a reappearance in this book and all we learn is that he likes beer. Practically all the characters from the original books are dead by this time. Almost none of the characters that appeared in the past few books appeared in this one and the few that did were not in it for long. That left us with new characters and while the main character was fine. The secondary characters we were forced to spend time with I found completely dull. I am done with this series.