I wanted to love it.

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Furyborn by Claire Legrand is the first installment in the Empirium trilogy. When my best friend chose Furyborn to read I was genuinely really excited – it has been hyped up by many people and seemed it had a lot to offer.

Furyborn speaks of a prophecy regarding two queens, a queen of light and a queen of blood. The story is told from two different perspectives, thousands of years apart from one another, and continues to flip back and forth between them throughout the whole book. Rielle and Eliana live in completely different times to the point where Rielle’s time period is almost like the mythos of Elianas current time period. Unfortunately, this is one of the things I didn’t love about Furyborn. The time periods were polar opposites, which made it hard to flip perspectives every other chapter and really took me out of the story in itself. Right when something would get interesting, we’d be in another time period a thousand years before or after.

Also, Furyborn is LONG. At 500 pages the length feels too long for the first installment in a young adult series. I, personally, had a hard time pushing through Furyborn and would get distracted for long periods of time, before I eventually just switched to the audiobook format in hopes to finish the book… but this book was EXHAUSTING! It was constant battles and fighting from start to finish with little else in between. Eventually the story exhausted me to the point I had to stop myself and ask why I should care, because I legitimately could not find a reason I should care about what happens in this story.

Don’t worry though, the characters aren’t the issue. Rielle and Eliana feel very real and somewhat human. This book does something interesting and introduces Angels, that are evil? Or good? It’s still unclear. Right away you are meant to believe that angels are evil, but I’m not exactly sure. It’s worth noting that I love the Angels because they aren’t what you see in our normal religious cultures – think more paranormal and less saintly. It’s a fun twist that does intrigue me about the book – but I feel like I do not know enough yet. I’m also not 100% sure I understand the magic system and find it rather confusing and harder to figure out, which can also drag someone out of the story being told.

My BIG BIG issue with this book though, is the storytelling tool used in the beginning. The opening scene (first chapter) is intriguing enough, but it leaves little to be desired and left me not wanting to read more. It gives away too much of the story and spoils a main plot point for one of the main characters. I know that starting the story from the ending is a common trope in adult fiction, but when one of your major plot points, and a big part of the story is spoiled within that scene… maybe not the best idea! Definitely was a factor in causing this story to drag on for me.

The only other thing that I took real issue with was just how sexy this book was, and by that I mean we had some very graphic scenes taking place in this book that tend to take up larger portions of some of the chapters. I am no prude and still leaned towards the idea that these scenes were uncomfortable. It definitely isn’t erotica, but it’s definitely more than I’ve seen in other YA books before. To be frank, this book tends to walk the line of young adult and new adult, and due to these scenes and just how violent the battles tend to be I would say this is more along the new adult side of things.

It’s worth mentioning that I genuinely do feel readers will be pushed to uncomfortable spots coming across these scenes for no real depth or anything added. I did want to give a praise on the romance/relationship front of all of this because I do appreciate that the arranged marriages were true to the times with Ludivine being Audric’s cousin, and I thought that was a really brave thing that a lot of authors are afraid to do.

All in all, Furyborn wasn’t a total let down, but I feel the plot and premise tend to get a little bit lost underneath all of the unnecessary details that do not do much for the story itself. That being said, I didn’t love it, but I also didn’t hate it – very middle of the road. I have already picked up Kingsbane, so I am interested to see what’s to come in the series and hopefully some of my issues become eradicated in the next installment.