Fireborne: 1 (Aurelian Cycle)

Product Information

Imagine for years and years that whenever you saw a dragon in the sky on the way to your village you knew that the rider, a dragonborn noble, will take your crops and money and dole out fiery punishment and death, and you might get an idea of how conflicted the ordinary citizens are about dragons in this fantasy novel. i genuinely have no words, this was ya fantasy excellence at its finest that left me breathless and riveted while reading. our mains lee sur power and antigone sur aela both so layered in both their own orphaned backstories yet led to them being in the same orphanage together, the events entangles their bond and loyalty to one another. I loved everything about this book: it’s exciting, it’s philosophical; it’s hopeful; it’s dark; it’s full of dragons and politics; it’s romantic in that grand, heroic tradition, without downplaying the ugly reality of governance and revolution and war. Who’s to say that the new regime won’t become like the old, when those in power forget their promises?

Still, Lee and Annie (and Griff, now) keep striving to find justice in a world hobbled by the systems put in place by the last bunch of omelet-makers, idealists and pragmatists and tyrants alike.It’s a heady idea with many inherent flaws and I think Munda does an excellent job of showing that without letting it become a political treatise. With war on the horizon and his relationship with Annie changing fast, Lee must choose to kill the only family he has left or to betray everything he’s come to believe in.

Rosaria Munda shapes a compelling story around the fraught nature of building a new regime on the ashes of the old, one that may be objectively better but is always in danger of failing its own ideals. Going up against the dragonborn court and a foreign princess, he faces a test of loyalty that sets his head against his heart. The world isn't black and white, and far too often people (myself included) try to filter the world into that dichotomy. A pair of kids who survived to grow up in an orphanage will now battle it out in the new regime to become the leader of the guardians. Their world is very gray, because every character has their reasons and those reasons make sense even as they are in opposition to one another.

Someone charismatic can be in charge, and I will be the shadowy advisor who comes up with practical ways to achieve their lofty idealistic goals. I said "Sort of" above because we get snippets of the revolution, and Lee's story, along with Annie's.