Fallen City Book Review: Adrienne Young's New Duology

We may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post.

What happens when the gods write your love story and then ask you to survive it?

Adrienne Young is one of my favorite authors. I will tell you that up front. I have loved her quiet, aching prose. I’ve followed her across genres and let her break my heart in several different settings.

I went into Fallen City expecting her to ruin me like never before.

What I did not expect was for her to humble me just a little. And I am still inside it.

Title: Fallen City (Fallen City Duology, 1)

Author: Adrienne Young

Publisher: Saturday Books

Format: eARC

Genre: Romantasy, Mythology, Fantasy, Romance

Release Date: November 4, 2025

Pages: 416

Star Rating: 4.5 stars

Spice Rating: 1 chili pepper

Fallen City‘s Setup

In the great walled city of Isara, a rebellion one hundred years in the making is finally igniting. And at the center of it are two people who were never supposed to meet, much less fall in love with each other.

Luca Matius is a legionnaire. He was supposed to be something else. He was supposed to inherit his uncle’s seat in the Forum, carry on the family name, and become the kind of man cities are shaped around. Controlled by.

Maris Casperia was raised in the strategic maneuvers of the Citadel. A magistrate’s daughter trained for a lifetime of service to a city that feels corrupt in its very fabric. Novice to the last Priestess who still holds the stolen magic of the Old War.

They meet. Because, of course, they meet.

And then the gods get involved.

The Dual Timeline Structure of Fallen City

Adrienne Young told Fallen City in a dual timelines, and I will never quite recover.

We move between the before. It is golden hour soft. It is the careful architect of two people falling in love across a landscape they were never meant to cross. Built in stolen afternoons, in the coverstations whispered in spaces, in places with lowered voices against the cooling stone of a city that does not yet know what it is about to give up.

The before timelines read like a held breath. Like the long pull into your lungs to be released just as slowly. The softness is the trap. The tenderness the evidence of it all.

The after is ash.

In the after, Luca walks through the aftermath of violence, searching the dead for a body with his hands open and his prayers silent. The after is a city that has stopped pretending it is anything but a war on a battlefield.

The prose in the after chapters shortens. The sentences clip. The sensory detail narrows to what a body can carry, weight, breath, blood, the cold scales of armor against the skin. Where the before timeline pulls you close and lets you linger in the words, the after timeline keeps moving because stopping feels a little too dangerous.

You can feel the difference in your chest before you understand it on the page.

And the two timelines are racing toward each other. Every chapter in the before is moving forward towards the moment everything broke. Every chapter in the after is moving forward toward whatever comes next. You, as the reader, are suspended between the two. Watching the book inhale and exhale the same disaster. And somewhere in the middle of the book, you realize that the structure itself is the devastation. You are not reading two timelines; you are reading the same wound from both sides.

“I had no way of knowing then that it would all lead to this.”

That line is the entire book.

Adrienne Young’s Roman-Inspired Worldbuilding

Isara isn’t just the setting of Fallen City. Isara is a character within the story.

A great walled city built on the magic of godsblood. A precious, powerful liquid that once lent mortals the strength of the gods themselves. Sown into fields, to make the harvest abundant. Baked into the clay bricks of the Citadel, to make sure they hold. Infused into medicines to bring the sick back from the edge of death. Forged into the weapons of the legionnaires so that the swords of Isara could not be broken by mortal hands.

But that was a hundred years ago.

By the time that Fallen City opens, the godsblood has been defiled. A hundred years of corruption. Godsblood in jewelry. Godsblood in vanity. In the pockets of men who never bled for it. The magic is still real. The magic still works. But the city has forgotten who it was for.

And Adrienne uses this, quietly, devastaingly, as the spine of her commentary. Fallen City is a book about nepotism, inherited power, the rot of wealth, and the corruption of the sacred when it is handed to those who did nothing to earn it.

The Greco-Roman aesthetics are exquisite. The Forum where the magistrates argue. The Citadel, where the powerful live. The chitons. The polished marble. The slow heat of an Isaran afternoon. The Philosopher. The Priestess. The legions. This is not a fantasy world borrowing from Rome as decoration. This is a world built on the bones of Rome, with all of Rome’s beauty and all of Rome’s cruelty woven into the same cloth.

And the stolen magic of the Old War. The magic the last Priestess still holds, the magic Maris has spent her novitiate learning to serve, sits over the entire book like a held note. Something happened a hundred years ago. The gods have not forgotten. And it’s something the city is about to be reminded of.

By the final chapter, you do not visualize Isara.

You remember it.

Fallen City and the Politics of Power: Greco-Roman Themes

Even the political machinations unfold expertly. Every time you think you’ve settled something, another piece is revealed that you wouldn’t have quite expected.

The pacing is slow and methodical. And I’ll be honest, sometimes it can feel a little too slow. There are stetches in the middle where you’ll want Adrienne to move, to land the reveal already, to give you the next piece. But she doesn’t. She holds. She builds. Let’s the building pressure continue to release, reveal after reveal. And by the time the back half of the book hits, you understand why she made you wait. Every page of that slow build is a page she is loading.

As mentioned, the commentary woven through it is exquisite. The nepotism. The rot of inherited power. The class divides. The corruption. The quiet, suffocating control. What war does to the people forced to live inside it, and what it does to the people who started it.

Adrienne Young is not writing a Greco-Roman fantasy because it is pretty. She is writing it because Rome is the original story of how a republic eats itself. How power, inherited and unearned, calcifies into rot. How the people who are closest to the seat of authority are the ones least equipped to wield it.

Fallen City takes that history and asks the question we keep failing to answer in our own world: what happens to the people who have to live inside a system designed to protect everyone except them?

This feels like Romeo and Juliet if Shakespeare had been raised on the Roman historian Livy. A love story written inside a political tragedy, where the lovers are not the cause of the catastrophe but the evidence of it.

The Romance in Fallen City: Slow Burn & Forbidden Love

This is not a romance that burns. Fallen City holds a romance that aches.

The chemistry between Luca and Maris is subtle and searing. It is full of unspoken words, sacrifices made in the silence, glances across rooms they shouldn’t be in together. Their love is built in those stolen moments, in plans whispered against the walls of a city that would destroy them both for what they’re doing. Every scene between them is a promise the book will break.

For those who love or read for spice. This one sits at a 1. There is one scene (with one or two alluded scenes). It is not graphic. It is, however, devastating. Because Young writes intimacy the way she writes everything else. Quietly, deliberatly, like the moment itself is being witnessed by something larger than the two of them.

(And it is. The gods are watching.)

Why Fallen City Earned 4.5 Stars

I need to be honest because that’s what you came here for.

Fallen City humbled me. The evocative writing, the politics, the Greco-Roman tension, the dual-timeline architecture, the way Adrienne Young writes longing as if it’s the climate the characters live in. If I were judging each element on its own, this is a five-star book without hesitation.

And yet…

I finished it, and I couldn’t quite name what I felt. I loved it. Loved it. I stayed up until 2 a.m. to finish the final act, then sat with it for days. But there’s a half-star sitting in the space between what this book is and what it asked of me. A space I can’t fully articulate yet.

Maybe it’s the disorientation of being inside a story this dense. Maybe it’s the way the ending refused to give me anything resembling rest. Or maybe it’s that I need Chosen Son in my hands before I can know what Fallen City truly was.

This is the kind of book that earns its full rating in retrospect, or even on reread. I have a feeling, though, that I will be coming back to revise this review.

Read Fallen City If You Like:

🏛️ Roman-inspired fantasy with deep political worldbuilding
💔 Star-crossed lovers and forbidden romance with high stakes
⏳ Dual timeline structures that ache with dramatic irony
🔥 Slow-burning romance where longing is the entire weather system
⚔️ Holy wars, diving intervention, and gods who write fate
🖋️ Adrienne Young’s signature lyrical, atmospheric prose
📜The Song of Achilles, These Violent Delights, Babel

Skip Fallen City If:

You need a fast-paced, action-driven plot from page one
You prefer single timeline narratives
You want a romance with explicit, on-page spice
You need a clean, resolved ending in book one
You don’t enjoy slow, methodical worldbuilding that demands your patience

Where to Read

Shop indie first, always. 🖤 Support your local indie bookstore through Bookshop.org or check it out from your local library through Libby.

If those aren’t options, it’s also available on Amazon, but please consider the alternatives first.

Final Thoughts on Fallen City

Fallen City is not a book you read. It’s a book you fall into and try to survive once you’re finished.

I am starting Chosen Son the moment this review goes live. Not because I am ready, but because I am not. Because after the ending of Fallen City, I need to know how Luca and Maris make their way back to each other. Or whether the gods, in the end, were writing something neither of them could carry.

I’ll be reading with my heart in my hands.

🖤

For my readers who feel everything, go read Fallen City.

Thank you to author Adrienne Young, NetGalley, and Saturday Books for providing me with an eARC to read and review.