Furyborn (Empirium #1) by Claire Legrand

To Be Published 22nd May 2018 (approx) by Sourcebooks (Kindle Edition)
Netgalley Review Copy
★★★★★

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'm excited to announce that this is my first 5-star fiction book of the year, and it was definitely worth the 4-month wait to get to it. This may be a quick review because to be quite honest, there wasn't much I didn't like about the book, so let's start with that shall we?

WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE
• The only character that I didn't like in the entire book was Rahzavel. I felt he was quite pointless, didn't really add much to the storyline, and just always seemed to appear out of the blue to fight with Eliana randomly. It was almost like a stereotypical villain trait to just pop up with "Mwahaha, you thought you got away, but I've got you now!" kinda thing, and it just felt kind of childish.

WHAT I LIKED
• The kickass female leads. The story revolves around Rielle and Eliana; thousands of years apart, but linked in a way. They're clever, determined, fierce, and just plain badass to be quite honest. It's been quite some time since I've read a book with a female lead that I actually loved.

• The character development in this book was amazing, you definitely saw every single character change throughout the book, whether it be in a good or a bad way. You just got to know each character on a really personal level, and even if I didn't know everything about one, then the mystery element definitely kept me hooked. You felt connected, and I almost cried on a couple of occasions...I didn't, but the fact that I almost did is a big deal, because I'm generally an emotional robot when it comes to books.

• I loved the plot. I know this is really vague, but I genuinely enjoyed everything about it - the fast-paced action, the twists and turns. There was never a point in the book where I was bored, as I was constantly on the edge of my seat - I think it helped that each chapter ended on a cliffhanger. Each chapter alternated from Rielle and Eliana's point of view and I just wanted to keep reading on to find out everything that happened.

• This is honestly something that I don't say often because I'm not a massive fan of it in general, but I really enjoyed the romance in the book. Without going into too much detail it just felt real and honest. It was all pretty gradual and had none of this "love at first sight" bullshit where two characters see each other and then are suddenly irrevocably in such a deep love like they had known each other their whole lives....and BREATHE. I could write a whole post about how much I generally hate how romances are written in books; especially ones that don't need them at all to advance the plot. Okay, I'm sorry, I digress, the romance progressed nicely without rushing. I mean, as I mentioned before, I felt attached to the characters massively so I feel this was the perfect addition to that.

• The author isn't afraid to tackle dark themes in the book, and because of this I'd maybe put this in the category of NA rather than YA? Themes such as death, violence, gore, loss of a parent, loss of a loved one, sex, abduction and torture. It wasn't a dark book per se, but it definitely had dark themes running through the entire thing which in a weird way I found oddly refreshing in comparison to the lovey-dovey YA books I'm used to reading - but as I said, I think this has steered a little bit away from YA because of this. It was hard-hitting, impactful, and made the story that much more interesting to read because it was so different.