Furyborn (Empirium Trilogy, #1)

by Claire Legrand

[Briana @ Pages Unbound]

I admit had some concerns about Furyborn before going into it. The plot summary on the jacket seemed like one of those unwieldy things where the editor(s) couldn’t quite figure out how to convey what the main point of the story was, so they just kept writing, and I had questions about how the stories of two queens born 1000 years apart were going to converge. After reading Furyborn…I realize my concerns were well-founded.

I think high fantasy like Furyborn often gets a pass on some striking flaws because when a book is “high concept,” readers can step back and say, “Oh, but it’s so imaginative! So creative! So unique!” It’s harder to do this with a book that’s, say, about a girl going to prom. If the pacing is off there, the pacing is off, and readers aren’t going to excuse it because some shiny magic or badass speeches about saving the world compensated for it. Basically what I’m saying is that I have conflicted feelings about Furyborn because I am experiencing this; I had definite issues with this book, but the cool world building occasionally made me think that maybe I could deal with them.

The primary problem: The book purports to have two protagonists with chapters alternating their points of view—but keep in mind that these protagonists live over 1000 years apart. My concerns that their storylines would be too disparate were well-founded. For the vast majority of the book, I felt as though I were reading too entirely separate novels. Honestly, I think in some ways the book could use a complete overhaul. The novel should have been about the “present day” queen, and the history of the older queen 1000 years in the past should have been woven in. Why the author decided to write these two things as parallel stories, and why the editor kept it, is beyond me. It may be unique, but I think there’s a reason people don’t generally write books like this; it doesn’t really work.

I also got annoyed that there was basically a cliff-hanger at the end of every chapter (until Rielle began completing a sequence of tasks, for which the outcome was obvious because…Eliana’s half of the book is set 1000 years in the future, and all the characters already know all about Rielle’s life). Some reader may actually find these cliff-hangers engaging, so it’s a personality thing, but I found it incredibly frustrating to keep jumping between two different stories that were always keeping information just out of reach.

Finally, I just didn’t really connect with any of the characters in the book—the protagonists or their various love interests. The author does try to make the characters complex, and I applaud that effort, but Eliana has the issue that she’s obnoxious and I mostly felt that other characters kept *telling* me she is secretly a wonderful person with a good heart, but it was hard to see why they thought so. Rielle is more interesting in terms of whether she’s good/bad, but I think all the things I actually wanted to know about her weren’t in this book and I need to wait for the sequel (which I won’t be reading BTW).

So, why three stars? Yeah…because it’s high fantasy, and it’s sort of original and all that stuff I said above. I haven’t read a book *quite* like this before, so it stands out. The magic is interesting. The religion is interesting. The plot is occasionally interesting. The author is clearly trying to write something awesome and epic. It didn’t work for me, but I can respect parts of it.