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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Oct 2019, 448 pages
Paperback:
Dec 2020, 464 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Jordan Lynch
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Game of Thrones meets Red Rising in a debut young adult fantasy that's full of rivalry, romance...and dragons.
Annie and Lee were just children when a brutal revolution changed their world, giving everyone--even the lowborn--a chance to test into the governing class of dragonriders.
Now they are both rising stars in the new regime, despite backgrounds that couldn't be more different. Annie's lowborn family was executed by dragonfire, while Lee's aristocratic family was murdered by revolutionaries. Growing up in the same orphanage forged their friendship, and seven years of training have made them rivals for the top position in the dragonriding fleet.
But everything changes when survivors from the old regime surface, bent on reclaiming the city.
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. And Annie must decide whether to protect the boy she loves...or step up to be the champion her city needs.
From debut author Rosaria Munda comes a gripping adventure that calls into question which matters most: the family you were born into, or the one you've chosen.
Prologue
Later, he would be known as the First Protector, and under his vision the city would transform. Serfs would be freed, schools would be built, and dragons would, for the first time, be ridden by commoners.
Before that, he was the leader of the bloodiest revolution his people had ever seen.
He never doubted that he would create a just city. Nor did he doubt that the families of the old regime deserved to die. But he did, sometimes, regret the way it happened, the day the palace was finally overrun.
He remembered in particular one of the ruling families, their tormentors still at work when he found them. The dragonlord had been kept alive, to watch; his youngest son was the only child left. A boy of about seven or eight, his expression blank beneath a mask of blood. The remains of their family lay around them.
"Stop this foolishness at once," the First Protector said, when he and his guard found them.
The revolutionaries let go of the boy, whom they had been hurting, and began to ...
Numerous YA novels focus on the beginnings of revolution, but few feature the aftermath, and Munda has stepped into that gap to explore what happens after the fighting is done and everything isn't necessarily as happy and peaceful as people thought it would be. The action and ferocity of the dragon battles keep the pace moving, but it's truly Annie, Lee and their complex history that make Fireborne a fantastic beginning to this trilogy...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Jordan Lynch).
Kristen Ciccarelli, internationally bestselling author of The Last Namsara
It's been a long time since a book made me this happy. Fireborne is my new favorite dragon book. Rachel Hartman, New York Times bestselling author of Seraphina
Fireborne is everything I want in fantasy.
Fireborne, the first book in The Aurelian Cycle trilogy, features a society that is restructuring after a political revolution, in which a select few citizens become dragon-riding warriors that protect the nation. This is the debut novel for author Rosaria Munda, who first conceived of the idea while listening to an audiobook about the Blitz, the nighttime bombing raids on London during World War II. She imagined a story with a focus on planes and aerial battles, but at that point, Munda describes the idea as "Ender's Game but with pilots in North Korea." Although that plot evolved over the years, the aerial battles remained, morphing from dogfights between pilots to epic battles waged from the backs of dragons. The idea for the two main ...
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