★★★★★

Two young women who live a millennia apart hold the world’s fate in their hands. Rielle has a power that the world has never seen before, and when she is found out, she has to go through seven deadly trials to prove she is not the prophesied Blood Queen, but the Sun Queen . If she doesn’t die before the trials end, she will be named Sun Queen — the Queen of light and salvation. A thousand years in the future, Eliana lives in a world without magic. She lives after Rielle has long been gone, in a world overtaken by the Undying Emperor. When her mother goes missing, she leaves her life of assassinations and follows a masked rebel only to find that the Emperor is more sinister than she ever imagined. Eliana and Rielle both have to find out how to survive while the world falls down around them. Their interwoven stories will decide the fate of everyone they love.

Furyborn was a slow burn, for me at least. The first few chapters went by in a blur, the multiple POVs threw me off — especially because the preface is in a third POV, so the first three chapters I read were all different people at radically different times in history.

The thing about multiple POV books is that they can be a bit hard to sink into at first, and Furyborn was no exception.

The thing about Furyborn, though, is I don’t even mind anymore. Because, sh**, this book is amazing.

Since part of my work for Fictionist entails constantly reading new books, I often get a feeling of deja vu while reading. Especially in YA fantasy.

That feeling didn’t really come with Furyborn. Of course, most stories have tropes woven in — ‘The Chosen One’ trope, enemies to lovers, etc —but Furyborn didn’t rely on any too heavily. It felt refreshing, new, and interesting. It wasn’t another fairytale retelling, it wasn’t exactly like the last YA fantasy I read; in other words, I didn’t know how it would end as soon as I started reading. I was genuinely interested in how the story would unfold, how the characters would get from point A to point B. Even if I thought I knew what would happen down the road, I had no idea how it would happen, and that kept me invested.

Not to mention, the character arcs were lovely, especially in Rielle’s chapters. The worldbuilding was also kind of a slow burn for me, but it was still good enough that I could stay in the world of Furyborn for several hours at a time without anything pulling me out of my reading trance. By the time I was halfway through the book, Legrand had started including more information about Furyborn’s history. Of course, part of this is likely that we depended on the characters’ knowledge, and chunks of worldbuilding wouldn’t really have fit in with either Rielle or Eliana’s early chapters. Still, once the worldbuilding became more prominent, I immediately felt more at home.

I wish I could keep reading this book forever — but all good things must end.

Furyborn will keep you up at night. It will grip you and not let you go until you can peel your eyes off the pages to try to get some sleep (so that you can read more in the morning). Savor it.

You can buy Furyborn now from Book Depository!