jesslyn's Reviews > Lightbringer

Okay. Here’s the thing: I’m so glad I decided not to give up on Furyborn.

I gave Furyborn a grand total of 2 out of 5 stars. I remember thinking it was one giant mess and I couldn’t for the life of me fully grasp the feel between whatever happened to Rielle and Eliana. Too much was happening and it felt like two books squeezed into one. I didn’t like Eliana and I sure as hell didn’t like Rielle. When I decided to read Kingsbane, I grew to like Eliana and hating Rielle.

This book managed to turn the tide around, somehow.

I even, somewhat, like Rielle now .

The Empirium Trilogy revolves around both the Blood Queen and the Sun Queen; Rielle and Eliana. Both of them are equally important and both of their arcs are what caused and became of this story. How the entire thing ends, depends on what choices these two made. Combined with time travel, the series is both complicated and epic: it’s rich in world building and I love the magic system but the stakes are higher; because of the time travel, everyone walks on a tightrope and the series can take you to unexpected places.

If you’ve read the first and second book, you’ll know about Rielle and how she is, basically. You can’t really blame someone for hating her and I do feel in some degree that she was written to be at least irritating to the readers. I spent the first two books wishing she was dead. I still stand by my opinion that the entire Rielle-Audric-Corien love triangle is ridiculous and I still don’t understand how they could even work. But in this book, she became more tolerable and I even started to feel for the girl. I think it’s because she had decided to go full evil and didn’t spend her time annoying me with “what’s right and what’s not”. I like how this book shows it clearly that despite finally accepting that she’s the Blood Queen, Rielle still has that spark of humanity that is actually more profound than the other two books. It makes me feel more for her as a person instead of seeing her as an all-bad character. But most of all, I pity her so much. She’s just a mere girl, being played around by fate’s hand. To be given that kind of power, that is somewhat turning you into a power-hungry person, and at the same time, there’s some ages old prophecy telling you that you WILL go evil. (view spoiler)[And since time travel is involved, it saddens me so much that no matter what happens, no matter how you tried to change the past, Rielle is always fated to have no happy endings. It’s like she was born to be doomed anyway, as shown by her death in the end. (hide spoiler)]

I think I don’t have much to say about Eliana. I love her strength and I love her resilience. I love how she always tried to do what’s right and save everyone even though there’s literally no catch for her. (view spoiler)[What happened to the ‘original’ Eliana (and REMY!) in the end, made me SO SAD. She would never have met Remy. We don’t know what eventually became of her friends in the future or if they ever existed. Looking at it, it sounds like the ending of this book is throwing away what happened to Eliana and the gang for the first two books but I can see no other way. (hide spoiler)]

One thing that I noticed from this book and the other two is that despite hating Rielle immensely, I actually enjoy what happened in the Second Age more than the Third Age. There’s some magical quality to it as shown by the time when magic still lives instead of the post-apocalyptic world Eliana lived in. And while I do get annoyed by Rielle a lot, I actually find her dark descent to villainy a creepy and fascinating one.

One of the cons of this book, which I think is a downgrade from Kingsbane, is the fact that there are so many POVs all at once. While we bounce back and forth between Rielle and Eliana in book one, we get a whole new addition to the cast like Corien, Audric, Ludivine, Jessamyn, Simon, and even Tal. It’s confusing as hell. I spent like three chapters at once, reading Rielle’s, Ludivine’s, and Audric’s POVs that when the chapter returned to Eliana, I got a little disoriented at first. I even totally forgot what happened to Eliana that time, which is annoying, because the last time we saw her (before the POVs shift to the characters in the Second Age), she was about to get slaughtered. Another thing about this is because there are too many characters, some of them got totally swept to the background when the book reached its’ peak.

There’s also the thing where the POVs of the characters in the Third Age (Eliana’s time; the future) are boring as hell. I spent like half of the book reading about them and nothing really happened. It was very slow for a finale and since this is the last book, the ‘epic conclusion’, I just feel like this is really annoying because the action and the whatnots piled up in the last half, so it was a little confusing to read.

Lastly, the ending! I didn’t know what I was expecting but it sure as hell wasn’t that. Despite not getting a surprising ‘smarter way’ to fix things, I enjoyed the climax so much. This might be an unpopular opinion because I’ve seen the majority of people disappointed with the ending. But even though the ending wasn’t what I expected, I think it fits more than what I had in mind. I find the ending to be a realistic solution to the problem they have and I think I would hate it if some more convenient solution came up suddenly.

Though I think the first half was a disappointing one, the last half; the climax and that ending , is a very powerful move and I think it would stick with me for a long time. It makes up for the flatness of the first half and saved the entire trilogy for me.