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The Aurelian Cycle Book 1
by Rosaria Munda
Book Reviewed by: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.
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).
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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Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
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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.
