Are you familiar with the concept of a book hangover? You read a book so good that after you finish, you have trouble getting through any other book, because nothing can compare. Fireborne gave me just such a book hangover. Since I finished reading it, I’ve read a chapter or two of five other books and have found myself putting them down and instead ruminating on Fireborne some more and wondering when the sequel will be out (sometime in 2020, I suppose). It’s the kind of book that reminds me why I love reading so much. It is that good.
In a previous life, before the revolution that toppled the ruling Triarchs and instituted a more equitable society where anyone – not just the nobility – could be chosen by a dragon and rise in society, Annie was a serf. Her family worked the land for a Triarch, one of the three rulers of the land who commanded great fire-breathing dragons. If serf families didn’t have enough of a harvest to tithe, they were punished. After a famine wipes out Annie’s family’s crops, the Triarch makes an example of them: he has his dragon burn them alive and makes six year old Annie watch.
Lee is the son of a ruling Triarch, a man who was murdered in his palace during the revolution, along with the rest of Lee’s siblings. Like Annie, child Lee watched it happen. He was almost murdered too, but the Protector – the leader of the Revolution – discovered what was happening and stopped it at the last moment. He quickly forgot about Lee, who was taken to an orphanage and from then on kept his true identity secret, for fear he would be executed if discovered.
Both children met at the same orphanage and grew close, having experienced similar traumas. Annie is the only one who knows who Lee really is, though neither has ever said it outright. They are now teenagers, chosen by dragons and in training to serve as Guardians, dragonriders who protect their nascent country of Callipolis. On the horizon are a series of battles that will determine who will be Firstrider – leader of the dragon fleet and likely next Protector. But this is not a book about a flying and fighting competition, though that aspect is certainly thrilling. Or rather, it’s not only about that. War is on the horizon – the ousted Triarchs may be dead, but some of their families made it out alive – and that fact will put strain on the baby country, with its high ideals and their imperfect implementation.
This is such a fun book. I’m writing about how fun it is first, because I want to emphasize that part of what makes this book so good is because it is a joy to read. It’s almost unbearably suspenseful at times. It had me racing through the pages, reading faster and faster at certain points so I could know what happened, but not wanting to read ahead because I might miss something equally important in the sections I skipped over. Munda is a top-notch plotter, and I was amazed and impressed by how the story twisted and turned but never felt anything less than authentic and genuinely motivated by her characters and their situations.
Munda’s world-building is fascinating and completely immersive. It’s some of the best fantasy world-building I’ve read in years, the kind that makes you sink into it and absorb it without even trying, without the need to backtrack and take notes and look at family trees and maps on endpapers (though don’t get me wrong, I love those kinds of things). I felt like I was living and breathing Callipolis. And despite the surface similarities to other dragon books, most notably in my experience Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern, Munda’s dragons and her dragonriders feel fresh. They have different magical rules and an interesting culture as backdrop. She introduces the concepts of sparking and spilling over, both of which are completely new to me and help define this living, breathing world. (You’ll have to read the book to learn what they mean!)
And then there’s the deep stuff. Munda writes in her author’s note that she was inspired in large part by Plato’s Republic, which I have not read, but also by the concept in general of what happens after a revolution. Teens in young adult fiction often help to start revolutions, but what happens when the revolution is over? What happens when the revolutionaries have won and they have to turn their efforts to building a new, better government? Shades of the French and Russian revolutions and their subsequent aftermaths tinge her book, though there’s no direct parallel (so you can’t really look to history to guess what’s going to happen next). Munda unpacks all the possible problems that could arise, from the seemingly small (leftover prejudice against lower classes), to the potentially huge (family members of slaughtered rulers wanting revenge), to the most earth-shattering of all (what if the new regime isn’t any better than the old?).
Annie and Lee face really hard choices – and they don’t always make the right ones. Lee in particular is torn between loyalty to his family (and the visceral memory of what was done to them) and loyalty to a new way of life that he now mostly believes in. Annie has her own struggles, including an equally vivid memory of an atrocity committed upon her family. The choices these two teenagers must make in the midst of an impossible situation literally made me gasp out loud at a few points. And each choice leads to another, which leads to another, each more heartrending than the last. You will read this book with your heart in your throat.
All of the pieces of a really great fantasy come together in Fireborne: complex characters, interesting plot, vivid world-building, thorny themes, and elegant writing. And Munda makes it all seem effortless. I got lost in this book; I hope you will too.
I received an advance reader copy from the publisher. Fireborne publishes October 15.
