I'm definitely regretting putting off this arc now that I've actually finished it. I wasn't expecting much from this, to be honest, but this book was amazing nonetheless.

Not many fantasy series are set after the revolution has already happened and generally focus on what leads up to it, with an assumed happy ending. This book shows that a revolution isn't an instant happy ending for the characters, society, world etc., and rather recreating the entire world to a new vision, without falling back on to old habits, is incredibly difficult. This book spends most of its times pondering questions of morality, whether that be in society itself or in the relationships between certain characters. It asks questions that you can never fully answer, and seems to fit the gray morality most fantasy worlds function in, rather than trying to paint things black and white. Fireborne does this so well, especially in the juxtaposition of the old society vs. the new. The main characters, due to their high role in society as dragon riders, are constantly forced to make tough decisions regarding these two societies, and have to try to navigate if the post-revolution society is actually even better than the one it forced out. It's extremely fascinating to read.

The characters themselves are also full of depth and layers, from the main characters to the side characters. Even they generally exist in between good and evil, depending on which perspective you view them through, and it seems to reveal the reality of the world, that no one is all one thing and sometimes hard decisions have to be made. This is especially shown in the relationship between Annie and Lee, dragon riders who grew up and trained together yet always a tension between each other, as Lee is secretly the son of the old Dragonlord who killed Annie's family. Their navigation of this power dynamic, and whether it still remains or not, is integral to the unraveling to the story and is overall well-written. There are other characters as well that seem to play on readers' sympathies at different moments, until later truths are revealed and things are uncertain once again. This entire novel is constantly asking its readers to engage differently with each character, and the process is a tough, yet interesting one.

Overall, I can't wait to see what book 2 brings, and I'll definitely be picking it up as soon as it comes out!

This is honestly a really tough book to review because lots of this hits really close to home and I don't really know how to feel about it sometimes. My situation is a lot farther from Jamie's, as I grew up knowing my parent's home country and their families, but yet sometimes I feel as isolated and pushed out by it, even sometimes my own home country too (like Jamie struggles with but through different motivations). So a lot of the questioning where one belongs/what culture one belongs to hit hard. The letters in the novel themselves also clicked with a lot of my own experiences

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as I'm also someone who came to a different country to study, and I felt a lot of the same things that Jamie's mother did (like being seen as an American, or even a tourist, is something that makes me cringe a lot sometimes)

And it's hard to explain how that impacted my reading experience, or my enjoyment of the book. It just made me feel raw or vulnerable at times, which honestly isn't a bad thing.

Honestly though, Anderson's representation of feeling between cultures, between families, between homes resonated deeply, which must mean that it was well done to a large extent. She captured a lot of what I've felt at times, being 'between' a lot of things myself. The way she portrayed European culture through American eyes was extremely well done as well, even done to the sometimes insanely small showers. Jamie had so many thoughts that I've had myself before, when comparing the two, or what I've heard Europeans say to me about America/ns. It just felt really authentic to reality, and I loved that.

Anderson also did a really great job of building up Provence, of bringing you along on Jamie's journey on her scavenger hunt. You feel her struggles when ordering, with tourists, and her enjoyment in all the new foods. You feel her awe when she comes across castles and beautiful, ancient cities, and I loved that so much. If this doesn't make people want to visit, I don't know what will.

The only reason this is 4 stars is because I found Jamie a little too frustrating at times, especially during her fights with Valentin. People lash out in anger but sometimes those fights, and the current conflict, felt a little forced, or worse, exaggerated. But honestly, this only detracted my enjoyment from very few scenes, as it honestly didn't happen that often.

Overall, I really enjoyed this and honestly didn't expect how real it would feel. I've always kind of avoided the books about Americans traveling to Europe (subconsciously, but still), but this might have convinced me to try and look for more.

I really really wish half stars existed because this book is a total 3.5. I enjoyed it and I loved a lot of it but I was just missing something. I honestly just entirely agree with Jaye's review (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3143922374).

There is a lot of good and great about this book. The magic in this book is so loose and unrestrained and that's honestly so rare to see these days, as everyone's trying to outdo each other with increasingly complex magic systems. It was nice to see magic just exist and for the cast to have absolutely no idea what was going on either, and to see them learn more about it together/with the reader. It means there's not that much to guide readers' understanding of the magic, but honestly that wasn't too big a problem. I also just loved the group's friendship, from how they found each other to how in tune they were to each others emotions and needs, you could tell they all really cared about each other. This is what we mean when we say we want more positive, female friendships! Follow this example!

This book was also so gay and I loved and needed that so much. I also love that not everyone is labelled and boxed off either, and there's lots of room for unsurety and exploration and just, love, I guess? For that matter, I really loved Alexis's dads, and how their relationship and parenting styles were portrayed (having two dads doesn't mean you have two identical parents! and that's shown so well here), and then there was Alexis and Roya and their endless pining. It wasn't always super cute but I loved it and it was just, really good rep overall. Also... Paulie. I just love her so much (and honestly see a lot of myself in her? both in terms of personality and... general confusion about identity). I just loved reading about her so much, and how she wasn't just boxed into some identity and that was it.

But then the whole book also felt like it was missing something. The conclusion came on really fast and the resolution/climax didn't seem to fit the amount of build-up. I'm fine with the whole magic system not really being explored further or explained, but it honestly felt like it was building up to some sort of explanation, and I just felt a bit lost and confused at the end, thinking "that was it?"

Anyways, even though this wasn't perfect, it was gay and it was magic and I highly recommend it! (Though, definitely big on the gore, especially in the beginning. So keep that in mind!)

Great cover, interesting premise, not great execution.

This book tried to do both horror and fantasy and did neither well. Instead of exploring the world and lore further, we got jump scares and monster scenes. Instead of building relations to the characters so that character death actually meant something, we got endless cave scenes and bickering.

Honestly this book started off alright, and the exposition was honestly quite interesting. Larkin was starting to grow on me and I felt for her situation and family, and it overall gave me some hunger games vibes. It was cut off too short though, and all that build-up washed away for me. We were suddenly thrown with a bunch of new cast members, and they started dying off so quickly you knew not to get attached (and so I didn't).

This book also was such a drag to read? I was listening to it on audio and that still tired me out. I had to force myself to keep listening at points, and it just got worse as the book went on. The twists didn't catch my attention at all (they felt weak and uninteresting, we didn't have enough connection to the world/lore for them to actually mean something). Deaths at some point stopped meaning anything, they just happened and that meant there were less characters involved. Even the

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the whole heritage thing didn't do it for me, especially when it was revealed that Larkin was the descendent of Kyran because of course she is.

I was originally interested in the whole Empaths + manipulating emotions into magic thing, but we only really got the development from the beginning of the story regarding it. This book tried to explore the depths of that magic without actually doing so, we still only ever got glimpses of the amount of power they could wield from myths and stories, and the occasional

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disciple doing something

. It also very quickly warped into magic aimed at warping bodies. I guess that's the horror element coming in but it felt like a narrowing of what we knew the magic could do, and the author decided to just only focus on the most potentially gruesome aspect.

Overall, not for me. There's a lot of things that could've been done better, especially because the setup and body manipulation gave me similar vibes to Gideon the Ninth, which I loved. It really wouldn't have been hard for this to be my thing, but it just lacked in all areas for me.

While this wasn't a bad book, I only started enjoying it at 70% on, so I unfortunately can't rate it any higher. I'm picky about my historical fiction but the issue is that I haven't read enough to know what I like and don't like exactly, but this book just didn't work for me in the beginning, and the revelations started coming a little too fast and a little too late.

Overall I enjoyed the storytelling and writing of this book, and the concept of having a ghost narrate the life of the living is an interesting one. Even when I wasn't necessarily enjoying the book it wasn't hard to stay engaged and following the story, as the writing was easy to follow yet compelling! I most likely will look into other books by this author because of that, even if this specific one wasn't fully for me.

I think the main issue overall for me was how the parallel storylines only meshed together in terms of content/themes, rather than in how the stories were told to the reader. It honestly felt like the two stories were battling for dominance for most of the book, and it overall felt very back and forth rather than two complementary stories running parallel to each other. It was all a bit too much, especially when the twists for both stories were being revealed at the exact same time. I didn't necessarily have trouble keeping the two apart, but I found myself only fully engaged with one at a time, losing interest quickly in the other. Generally, this story was Frankie's, and it made the more ghostly tales of Pearl drag on for me, and only really started affecting me when we hit 70%. All in all, I think the story could have made similar thematical statements by focusing on only one of the girls, and it would've probably been stronger for it.

I didn't hate this, it just didn't grab me early on and ended up suffering for it. I did like it in the end though, but I feel my rating has to be fair to the book as a whole, and I did feel tempted to DNF it around 40%.