A prophecy connects two girls separated by a thousand years.
Furyborn is part of Claire Legrand's Empirium Trilogy, a young adult fantasy book published in 2018.
Rielle Dardenne sacrifices everything to save her best friend, the crown prince, who is ambushed by assassins. Only a pair of predicted queens, one of light and redemption and one of blood and death, should have this incredible power. If she does not put her powers to the test, she will be executed; unless the trials kill her first. When the Undying Empire captured her country, Queen Rielle turned to violence to ensure the survival of her family. Eliana Ferracora embarks on a dangerous trip with a rebel leader to find her mother a thousand years later. She discovers that the empire's core darkness is far more frightening than she could have anticipated. Rielle and Eliana's narratives intersect as they fight in a millennia-long cosmic war, and the striking parallels between them ultimately determine the fate of their world–and each other.
It was really difficult to give this book a rating. I kept hesitating between 3 and 4 stars, and I'm still not sure if I ranked it appropriately based on my feelings. To begin with, the stories are great! Each of the main characters has a distinct personality that makes them extremely menacing. Eliana was without a doubt one of my favorite characters in the book. In a world where we're used to reading stories about heroines, it's nice to encounter a character who is highly adept at being bad every now and then. A figure that appears to struggle with genuinely knowing the difference between good and wrong. While the narrative moved slowly at first, it soon became engrossing. There was always something going on between Rielle's trials and Eliana becoming an assassin. After the first third of the book, it was difficult to be bored.
The three-star rating comes into play at this point: Confusion. I kept asking why it wasn't two novels long throughout the book. I'm confident that as the series develops, we'll have a better grasp of how these two people and their stories intertwine. This novel, on the other hand, might easily have been divided into two parts, each having a compelling story arc. Perhaps the book wouldn't have gotten such mixed reviews. I couldn't get over my anger at reading two very different stories in the same book for some reason. How can these stories, set a thousand years apart, possibly collide!?
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