Fireborne: 1 (Aurelian Cycle)

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Recommended for both teens and adults who enjoy a mentally stimulating novel and for those who wish to lose themselves in a world full of dragons. I see the comparison and mention of Plato's Republic and the French Revolution, even Blitz and I personally saw some similarity with the Russian Revolution.

After I got into the flow and beyond the "dragon school" elements, I was hanging on every word of the book. fireborne took me by complete surprise in the best way possible, when i went into this story with the only knowledge that it had an academy for dragonriders. Annie and Lee came from very different backgrounds in their world, Annie had been a lowborn while Lee had been an aristocrat but with the revolution everyone was eligible to become a dragonrider and status was based on their abilities leaving Annie and Lee both rising stars now.

Lee and Annie remain idealists in this book, as they were in the previous one, but they discover very clearly that high ideals are not a trustworthy protection against benefiting from unequal systems.

An aristocrat in hiding, and a former serf who meet in the orphanage, test side by side into their new regime’s dragonriding program, and have to decide if they really can leave the past behind them—and if the new regime really is better than what came before. He was my favourite, he was the only one who made any kind of sense, had a motive and somehow felt like a real character. Fireborne is everything I want in fantasy: deep world-building, fierce and vivid characters, heartbreaking choices, and dragons, dragons, dragons. there was realistic conflict between the affluent elite, the leaders of the New Regime, and the common folk. What I got was one off page battle between enemies and two on page battles between allies n dragonback.Whilst their primary goal (equality) is laudable, they do other things that lead to mass civilian casualties and MORE FAMINE. Plus she was possibly flying her dragon for longer than Lee, and I suppose she would get better tutors.

It reassured me in the sense that there really aren’t easy answers to the question “How can we fix the world?There is such a huge focus on government corruption and its ability to make anything seem alright with the right words.

She also does harken back to the Aeneid and Republic in some ways, glorifying their ancient poetry and texts that are oh so similar to the Aeneid and the Republic.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. This reads like an amalgamation of several dragon books ( A Game of Thrones and Harry Potter among others), but without those books’ distinct voices and characters. 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. Fireborne's world is a brutal one, and one of the harshest and most realistic portrayals of a complex government I have seen in a book.