When I first heard of Furyborn last spring, it sounded interesting. Two queens fulfilling a prophecy over thousands of years? Sign me up! Then I started to hear mixed reviews and I decided to hold off on it.
My review will be slightly mixed as well.
The first queen, Rielle, seems like a very nice girl. Her family has kept her sheltered because she has magical powers that she has trouble controlling. As a child, her powers got out of control – with deadly results. When she sneaks out of the house and ends up using her powers to save the prince, the whole kingdom makes her go through trials to prove that she’s the prophesied (and eagerly anticipated) Sun Queen. You root for her, but you know from the prologue that she’s actually the Blood Queen – the other prophesied queen that people have dreaded.
The other queen, Eliana, is not even in the nobility in this book. Eliana is an assassin with a strange power: she can’t be damaged. As a reader, you know that she has to be the prophesied Sun Queen, but how? While Rielle seems to be so nice, Eliana is not really.
My thoughts on this book are mixed, probably because it took me a while to warm up to this book. The book switches POVs between the two girls, and for several chapters, just when I start to care about one girl, the POV switches and… I don’t care as much? I’m not sure if it’s because I listened to this in audiobook format and I was a little confused about what was going on or if it just wasn’t amazingly exciting, but it took me a while to get the two girls’ stories straight and become excited about what was going on.
Nevertheless, as the story progressed and I got to know the two girls, I became intrigued. How did sweet Rielle become the monster that the people in the second timeline know her as? How did Eliana the assassin become the Sun Queen? Alas, you won’t find out in this book.
Despite the fact that it took me a while to warm up to Furyborn, I do want to find out what happens next. I won’t rush out to pre-order the next book in the series, and I’ll probably get it from the library, but I do plan on reading it. This book may not be one of the best books I read last year, but it was nevertheless enjoyable.