Book Review: Furyborn by Claire Legrand

Furyborn (Empirium #1) 

by Claire Legrand

3.75/5 stars
Release Date: May, 22nd.

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.

Furyborn, the first physical ARC (advanced reading copy) to ever come my way and I was beyond excited! So excited, it took me five months to read it! Thing is with Furyborn was that although it intrigued me, there was no sudden urge or desire to pick it up immediately to read it. To be completely honest, what made me finally pick it up and read it this month was the fact that it was coming out next month and hey, it’s my first physical ARC and I wanted to take advantage of being able to read said book before it actually came out, okay?

So, despite the lack of immediate desire to read Furyborn, it was something I was interested in. It’s a fantasy that spans a thousand years, differing between two women living in a different time to one another. We are first introduced to Rielle, who has a special power that she has been forced to keep secret for a number of years and her father despises her for it. She is a ruthless character with a burning anger within her whilst also displaying warmth and friendship to those close to her. The interesting thing I found with Rielle was that I feel as though if I knew her personally, I probably would hate her. She is irrational at times and arrogant, two traits which I find doesn’t normally bode well for main characters in terms of popularity. That being said, there was something likeable about her and I can’t quite put my finger on it. She is secretly in love with the prince who is promised to another, her best friend no less and despite this; it’s quite a lovely threesome. In fact, I would have liked to have seen more scenes between them.

Contrast this to Eliana, who is living a thousand years after Rielle where Rielle is simply a story at this point, she is spoken in the way that we speak about our Kings and Queens of years past and she isn’t exactly loved. This part in particular, intrigued me as the things that Rielle was hated for were unimaginable of the Rielle we are reading about in her current story; how did she end up that way? Eliana, is much of the same as Rielle. She is hard and rash and cold at times, (most times) of course, as we read on; we begin to see more of her emotional side but ultimately, Eliana didn’t become a big ball of loving fluff who loves rainbows and flowers – she was still cold and brutally honest throughout the book but still managed to evoke sympathy within me at times.  

This book managed to flip my reaction on its head in terms of these two characters. For the first half of the book, I didn’t care for Eliana at all and I was mostly intrigued by Rielle’s story, more than once I was annoyed when I remembered that when I came to the end of Rielle’s chapter it would mean reading a Eliana chapter. However, as I said this changed entering the second half of the book as I was way more invested in Eliana’s story and that may or may not have something to do with another character that is introduced into Eliana’s story. But that would be telling.

This story is filled with mystery, magic and intrigue but I’d be lying if I said it had my full attention throughout. For a good proportion of this story, I was well aware that I was reading it in order to read it before May – I know, the completely wrong reason to read a book but hey, in the end I ended up picking up a book I probably wouldn’t have and enjoying it overall so winner for me. The problem I had with this book is that in the beginning, it very much felt back and forth constantly, and I’ve already mentioned that Eliana and Rielle switch chapters every other but that aspect kept bringing me out of the story. It took a while to feel seamless, but it got there in the end.

I dabbled between giving this a 3.5 or 4 star rating, simply because I did enjoy this and I want the next instalment as soon as possible if you please but it did take a good 150-200 pages for me to get into it. Now, I don’t DNF books but if I did, I’m not convinced this one would have made the cut. In the end, I settled on a 3.75 (I know, I’m getting pedantic) but a 4 was just too much a 3.5 felt too little and apparently, it means a lot to me how accurate my star ratings are. But seriously, when is the next one coming out?