Furyborn (Empirium #1) by Claire Legrand
Blurb:
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.
My Review:
Let me start by saying that I love the cover of this book. Whoever handles the cover art for Sourcebooks Fire always knows what they're doing.
Furyborn starts off strong and I was hooked on the prologue, dying to find out what happened next. I mean a queen who is hated by her people for killing her husband giving birth to her child then the healer that's helping her is possessed by an evil angel dude and jumps off the balcony to his death? The queen giving her newborn to the healer's son so he can take her to safety just before she's killed in a showdown with the evil angel dude? The possibility that the child and newborn won't make it to safety? Tell me more!
But the story doesn't go that way. It's told in dual perspectives between Rielle (the future queen in the prologue) and Eliana - who is 1000 years in the future. It goes back to two years before the events of the prologue then jumps to Eliana's part of the story. Independently maybe I could have enjoyed Rielle and Eliana's respective stories. Maybe this series could have been made a generational saga or something where the first book was devoted to Rielle and the events leading up to the prologue and then the next book could pick up with Eliana - the child of Rielle who made it 1000 years into the future; but with their stories together this book lost me.
I liked the premise of Rielle and Eliana being badass female characters but their personalities missed the mark for me and I found them hard to like, although I liked Rielle slightly better than Eliana. Plus, for a YA their attention focused on sex a lot - which for me being nearly 26 didn't bother me but it should be labeled for older teens maybe?
Overall this is not a book for me. The story dragged at times and I found myself wondering why I was torturing myself trying to force myself to read it. 500 pages felt a lot more like 1000 by the time I was done.
My Rating:
🌟
1 of 5 Stars!
