Just Finished Reading Furyborn by Claire Legrand

Author Claire Legrand has begun the Empirium fantasy trilogy for young adults with the 2018 book Furyborn.  Once again it's an imaginary world loaded with magic, history, war, and flawed characters searching for their identity and direction...ho-hum.  The narrative is split between two women, Rielle and Eliana, as their lives take place a thousand years apart.  Rielle's time is permeated with magic, and she possesses enough special abilities that others suspect her of being the fulfillment of a two-part prophecy: is Rielle the much-hoped-for Sun Queen who will rescue the world for its people, or is she the much-dreaded Blood Queen who...well, that title can't bring with it very much good.  A thousand years later young Eliana, with special hidden talents, finds herself in a world depleted of magic and working as a paid assassin for the much-feared Emperor.  Although her acts are atrocious, her motives are pure: to save her own family from persecution and death.  How these two manage to get through their trials, the people they meet...especially their love interests...and the complicating presence of "angels" form the body of the narrative.  Rielle's fate seems sealed at the start of the book and her subsequent narrative is presented in the form of a flashback.  Eliana, on the other hand, has an open future and seems to hold the key to everything: exactly who is she, anyway?

After I finished Furyborn, I read some of other readers' reactions on the Internet.  It seems that folks either liked it a lot or they hated it.  To me, though, it's just a story, well-told, that falls into the common fantasy fiction trap of spend too much time discussing rules of magic and the world's intricate concocted history.  Well, I knew it was just a trilogy and not a long series before I began it, and Book Number Two is coming out in 2019...so I won't have to wait long (and forget everything I read) before I can continue the series.  I am interested in the characters and, although this isn't my favorite series by a longshot, it's good escapist reading...despite me not being a "young adult"...