Early Review – Furyborn (The Empirium Trilogy, Book 1) by Claire Legrand (4/5 stars)
Reading Level: Young Adult
Genre: Science Fiction
Length: 512 pages
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Release Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN-13: 978-1492656623
Stand Alone or Series: 1st book in the Empirium Trilogy
Source: ARC from Amazon Vine
Rating: 4/5 stars
“When assassins ambush her best friend, Rielle Dardenne risks everything to save him, exposing herself as one of a pair of prophesied queens: a queen of light, and a queen of blood. To prove she is the Sun Queen, Rielle must endure seven elemental magic trials. If she fails, she will be executed…unless the trials kill her first.
One thousand years later, the legend of Queen Rielle is a fairy tale to Eliana Ferracora. A bounty hunter for the Undying Empire, Eliana believes herself untouchable―until her mother vanishes. To find her, Eliana joins a rebel captain and discovers that the evil at the empire’s heart 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.”
This is the first book in the Empirium trilogy and was a well done fantasy story. While I enjoyed the story and characters I didn’t really like how the story was formatted.
I struggle to designate this as YA because of same fairly explicit sex scenes; the characters do seem to be in the older teens, early 20’s so maybe this is more of a new adult series.
This book alternates chapters between two different strong female characters. One is in the past and one is 1000 years in the future. Honestly this format didn’t work very well for this book. While both stories are engaging on their own, there weren’t enough common elements to switch back and forth between them. The constant switching between stories ends up being jarring and disrupts the flow of the story a lot.
The above format works well for a book like The Bone Witch. In the Bone Witch the present story impacts the story we hear from the past and ties things together nicely while slowly unveiling a mystery. This book doesn’t do that and would have been much better if we had read Rielle’s story first and then Eliana’s story second…rather than jumping back and forth.
This story was engaging. I enjoyed the world-building and the characters. There’s quite a bit of action here as well. I thought the costume descriptions before Rielle’s trials was a bit hokey (it was very Hunger Games and makes it seem like Legrand is hoping movie rights will be picked up for this series).
I am unsure whether or not I will continue with the series. I really disliked the way the book switched between these two characters when the stories were fairly separate. If the next book is formatted this way I probably won’t read it.
Overall this is a promising start to a new epic fantasy series featuring strong female characters. I really disliked the format of how each chapter switched between a different story/book and forced the reader to jump back and forth.
This book goes towards the following reading challenges:
– New Release Reading Challenge
– Goodreads Reading Challenge
