The False Prince Add a review

The Ascendance Series (formerly the Ascendance Trilogy) is a series of juvenile fantasy novels by Jennifer A. Nielsen. In the Ascendance Series, an orphan named Sage is kidnapped and trained to impersonate Prince Jaron, the missing Prince of Carthya. After Sage ascends the throne, he has to lead Carthya through a destructive war with multiple neighboring nations.

The first book in the series, The False Prince, was first released on April 1, 2012, through Scholastic Press. The book sold well and its paperback reprint placed The False Prince on The New York Times Best Seller list in May 2013. The second book, The Runaway King, was released on March 1, 2013, and the third book, The Shadow Throne, was released on February 25, 2014. In December 2019, Nielsen announced that a fourth book in the series would be published in October 2020, titled The Captive Kingdom, and also confirmed that she would be writing a fifth book in the series. The Captive Kingdom was released in October 2020. At the back of the book, an excerpt confirmed the title of the fifth novel to be The Shattered Castle.

Reception for the first book was mostly positive, but decreased to mixed for the second and third books. While Paramount Pictures licensed the movie rights for the series in 2012, they did not renew the contract for the series in 2017.