Furyborn by Claire Legrand – Review

Published: May 22, 2018

Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire

Series: Empirium #1

Genre: Fantasy, Young Adult

Pages: 512 (Hardcover)

My Rating: 4.5/5.0

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Synopsis:

Follows two fiercely independent young women, centuries apart, who hold the power to save their world…or doom it.

When assassins ambush her best friend, the crown prince, Rielle Dardenne risks everything to save him, exposing her ability to perform all seven kinds of elemental magic. The only people who should possess this extraordinary power are a pair of prophesied queens: a queen of light and salvation and a queen of blood and destruction. To prove she is the Sun Queen, Rielle must endure seven trials to test her magic. If she fails, she will be executed…unless the trials kill her first.

A thousand years later, the legend of Queen Rielle is a mere fairy tale to bounty hunter Eliana Ferracora. When the Undying Empire conquered her kingdom, she embraced violence to keep her family alive. Now, she believes herself untouchable–until her mother vanishes without a trace, along with countless other women in their city. To find her, Eliana joins a rebel captain on a dangerous mission and discovers that the evil at the heart of the empire is more terrible than she ever imagined.

As Rielle and Eliana fight in a cosmic war that spans millennia, their stories intersect, and the shocking connections between them ultimately determine the fate of their world–and of each other.

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I’m becoming more and more skeptical of YA books as the years progress, especially when certain bookish communities seem to be promoting these books with rabid enthusiasm but in this case I’m delighted to say that Furyborn was actually a great read. This book has some classic tropes like the secret rebellion, super special main character, evil empire, etc. but I thought they were well done and didn’t make me want to roll my eyes so hard they got stuck. SourceBooks has been putting out some appealing YA in the last few years and the cover art and synopsis for this book made me immediately want to read it, whether or not it had early reviews at the time.

Furyborn has two POVs, which have a unique twist – they’re set a thousand years apart. Rielle Dardenne is nobility in an age of magic and she just happens to wield all seven kinds, meaning she is one of the prophesied Queens. She must undergo a series of trials set forth by the church to determine if she is the Sun Queen, destined to save her people, or the Blood Queen who is destined to doom them. Obviously if she’s the Blood Queen, things will end in blood for her. A millennium later, Eliana Ferracora is a bounty hunter merely trying to provide for her family in a world slowly being taken by an Empire across the sea. She quickly gets tied up with a rebel group when her mother disappears and things are a headlong hurtle towards drama, battles, and a plot twist that was simple to guess from the beginning, but satisfying nonetheless. Also, there are angels that aren’t nearly so good as you would expect them to be. In fact, most of them are heartless monsters out for revenge and domination.

I was surprised to find that I liked both POVs equally. I didn’t resent switching back and forth between them or rush through the POVs I don’t like as I find myself doing in some books. Rielle was particularly interesting because you find out her fate in her first introduction, while the rest of her chapters lead up to how she gets there. I thought the use of magic and the society in her much earlier POV were really interesting and I’m a sucker for anything involving trials, so Rielle was a win for me. Eliana is a YA tough girl – she’s like 17 or 18 (I don’t exactly remember) and she goes and hunts people down on behalf of the Undying Empire for money. Gotta keep food on the table somehow, right? What I like about Eliana is that she doesn’t turn into a willing participant in the rebellion right away, she tries to play both sides of the fence because all she wants to do is find her mother the quickest way possible. The side characters were also likable, especially Ludivine and Audric who, with Rielle, formed a very likable trio of friends. Simon was also fascinating and his presence was kind of a spoiler for the reveal towards the end of the book.

Overall, I thought this was a really cool book that plenty of action and emotion to keep me hooked for the entire time. Sure, there were a few things I thought were cheesy, particularly Eliana being called “The Dread of Orline”. It was sooo melodramatic that I thought I was either going to burst out laughing or die of embarrassment on behalf of this character. I’ll definitely keep up with series as I really enjoyed this first book – it was better than your average YA book, for sure!