Fireborne: 1 (Aurelian Cycle)

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The world isn't black and white, and far too often people (myself included) try to filter the world into that dichotomy. That's not even considering the explanation to the synopsis: And then what pulled it all together was Plato's Republic, which I studied a bit in college. Booklist, starred reviewGame of Thrones meets Fourth Wing in a debut young adult fantasy that's full of rivalry, romance .

As for Annie being a Commander, I did not get nor liked how Lee handed her that position in the end. While it may not draw you in the way Fourth Wing does from the first chapter, it eases you into a much darker, much more upfront world that still relies on dragons.Does Lee have serious and lasting trauma from watching his whole family get slaughtered by the rebels who now govern his country? 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.

This story centers around Annie and Lee, two orphaned survivors of a great revolution that brought about the end of the ruling Barron class of dragon riders in favor of a 'communist' system.Who’s to say that the new regime won’t become like the old, when those in power forget their promises?

This is my favorite book of all time and, as such, that means I can never bring myself to give it a proper review. I wouldn’t exactly describe Flamefall as having twists, because like the stories of classical antiquity that it draws on, there’s a certain stony inevitability to everything that happens. And the exploration of the political and social aspects created an extra depth of reflection for myself that I feel I don't get with some other books (fantasy or not, just books in general).

There’s this moment in Flamefall, the second book in Rosaria Munda’s Aurelian trilogy, where the protagonist asks one of the leaders of a scrappy band of rebel freedom fighters what they’re fighting for. I wanted to imagine an orphaned aristocrat who has every reason to seek revenge, until he realizes that maybe, his family did wrong, too.