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BOOK REVIEW: Furyborn, by Claire Legrand

- Meg

BOOK REVIEW: Furyborn, by Claire LegrandTitle: Furyborn by Claire Legrand
Series: The Empirium Trilogy #1
Published by Sourcebooks Fire
Published: May 22nd 2018
Genres: Fantasy, Young Adult
Pages: 512
Format: eBook
Source: Netgalley, Publisher
Goodreads

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.

 I think Claire Legrand’s Furyborn is going to be one of the biggest YA fantasy books of the summer. It’s full of magic, strong-willed young women, and nearly impossible challenges for each of them to overcome. The two main characters are connected to each other (and no spoilers!), but each of them live over a thousand years apart. For me, the idea behind this series is exciting, but I found that the execution of it is a little overwhelming. Connecting two characters across a span of a thousand years brings together two completely different stories told in alternating chapters.

Legend has it that two queens will possess extraordinary power. The Blood Queen will bring catastrophe and destruction to her reign; the Sun Queen will bring light and and salvation to her reign. Rielle, the prophesied powerful queen of a thousand years ago, is merely a legend to the bounty hunter Eliana. However, Eliana knows that she possesses extraordinary powers and struggles to keep her powers a secret from everyone else.

The things I loved most about this and hope will be explored more in the future books are the magic system and the history of what happened between Rielle and Eliana. I thought the initial world-building of the magic system and country engaging; I just wanted more! Rielle and Eliana are fairly well-developed, though sometimes I felt that their voices sounded too similar and had to remember which chapter I was reading (but considering their connection, I shouldn’t have been so thrown off by this!). The secondary characters really added to this story. I loved Simon and Ludivine the most, and loved the twists and connections they brought to the story.

Overall, this is an ambitious fantasy novel that will appeal to fans of Sarah J. Maas and Erika Johansen! I gave it four stars for the pacing and the scope, but it’s almost a little too much. I think maybe this could have worked better if two books of the trilogy focused each Rielle and Eliana separately and the final book bringing their stories together, because this novel felt like a very long and divided set-up for the rest of the series.

A copy of this book was provided for review by Netgalley and Sourcebooks Fire; all opinions are my own.

BOOK REVIEW: The Bone Witch, by Rin Chupeco

- Meg

BOOK REVIEW: The Bone Witch, by Rin ChupecoTitle: The Bone Witch by Rin Chupeco
Series: The Bone Witch #1
Published by Sourcebooks Fire
Published: March 7th 2017
Genres: Fantasy, Young Adult
Pages: 400
Format: eBook
Source: Netgalley
Goodreads

The beast raged; it punctured the air with its spite. But the girl was fiercer.
Tea is different from the other witches in her family. Her gift for necromancy makes her a bone witch, who are feared and ostracized in the kingdom. For theirs is a powerful, elemental magic that can reach beyond the boundaries of the living—and of the human.
Great power comes at a price, forcing Tea to leave her homeland to train under the guidance of an older, wiser bone witch. There, Tea puts all of her energy into becoming an asha, learning to control her elemental magic and those beasts who will submit by no other force. And Tea must be strong—stronger than she even believes possible. Because war is brewing in the eight kingdoms, war that will threaten the sovereignty of her homeland…and threaten the very survival of those she loves.

 Rin Chupeco’s The Bone Witch is a fantasy about a girl who accidentally discovers her powers when she brings her brother back to life. She is taken in by a bone witch for training, and her brother, Fox, becomes her zombie familiar of sorts. The story follows Tea’s instruction from age twelve to about age fifteen? We get to see the “coven” in which she is raised and trained, the day-to-day life, the details of the clothes she and the other people wear, glimpses of the food, and all of the minute details that comprise Tea’s education. In a way, this works, but it also drags the story out and often feels like nothing is happening. Most of the action happens in the first quarter of the book and the last quarter of the book, and the rest is mostly world building filler with a few minor conflicts that Tea has while learning how to utilize her powers.

The world building in this story draws heavily from Chinese influences, and this makes it different for me from any of the recent YA fantasy I’ve read. The atmosphere and setting are richly detailed, and everything is described so vividly, and I enjoyed that a lot. I also like that the main character’s magical powers are necromancy. It’s dark, and it’s different from the soft and beautiful magic often reserved for female characters. I like that, and I want to see how that power grows and manifests itself as she ages. Fox is probably my favorite character, because who doesn’t love a sidekick named Fox who is also a zombie and who also has an interesting personality?

After finishing this, I found myself wanting more, more to have happened and more to have been done with the story. The intertwining parts of a bard recounting his experiences with an asha (who is most likely Tea) in the future with the story of Tea in the past is very reminiscent of Rothfuss’s Kvothe in The Name of the Wind, and I feel like this is like the younger end of the spectrum YA sibling to The Kingkiller Chronicles. The world Chupeco created is so grand and so vivid that I just wanted to see more of Tea’s interaction with that world and within that world rather than descriptions of it, and I’m hoping that’s what we’ll get to read in the sequel.

A copy of this book was provided to me by Sourcebooks Fire and Netgalley for review; all opinions are my own.