Annie’s lowborn family was executed by dragonfire, while Lee’s aristocratic family was murdered by revolutionaries. To me Fireborne was one of those so-so young adult novels that the biggest downfall to me was the incredibly slow pace of the story.

Growing up in the same orphanage forged their friendship, and seven years of training have made them rivals for the top position in the dragonriding fleet. 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. That and the difficult choices, plus the twists in the backstory that you think you know, add up to a real page turner. These characters are essentially at war, and Munda does not hold back on showing you the brutality they endure and the trauma they suffer. But the rest, Hermione Granger (I suppose that was Annie, but I don't really see it), Game of Thrones.

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. In addition to the amazing world building, Fireborne is centered around friendship, integrity and loyalty. But he’s a swing character, crafted to do the opposite of what you expect when the author needs something doing that doesn’t make sense. Not that anyone has inquired, but if EYE were goingto run a resistance organization, what I’d do is create two separate groups that would appear to be in opposition to each other but secretly they’d be working in concert, and one of the groups would be the nonviolent resistance guys with very clearly articulated policy proposals and a squeaky clean religious leader at its head and the other group would espouse the rhetoric of burning everything down, which they would back up by burning down high-profile targets sometimes, so the ruling class would be very afraid that if they didn’t implement the nonviolent guys’ policy proposals, they’d instead get burned down by the violent guys, so they’d be like, well we won’t talk to you violent jerks, but we’ll talk to these other guys who share some of your less radical goals and seem like they wouldn’t burn down a school, and that’s how I would get my own way in the end, if I were in charge of The Resistance.

From the very start the romantic tension had me rooting for one pair to end up together, then another, and then it got all mixed to the point I gave up and sat back to instead enjoy watching it unfold. Still, Lee and Annie (and Griff, now) keep striving to find justice in a world hobbled by the systems put in place by the last bunch of omelet-makers, idealists and pragmatists and tyrants alike. Fabulous reading, magnetic scenes, and the turmoil of being a young adult expected to become steely warriors.i wish she had found out about hin later on in the book but anyway, i still liked how it turned out.

I highly recommend this book to all ages, but if you are an older reader who still enjoys YA, go pick this up! 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. i’ve been eyeing this trilogy since months but never had the chance to read it so when i finally did, i had high expectations - obviously. I loved everything about this book: it’s exciting, it’s philosophical; it’s hopeful; it’s dark; it’s full of dragons and politics; it’s romantic in that grand, heroic tradition, without downplaying the ugly reality of governance and revolution and war.Who’s to say that the new regime won’t become like the old, when those in power forget their promises? By the time 35% of Fireborne rolled around I was firmly rooting for Annie and Lee to overcome the uncomfortableness between them to be together. It feels funny to use the word reassuring about a series that deals with issues as dark as those discussed in the Aurelian series.

The romance is nuanced and slow burn, as they jockey for position in the government as well as with their feelings. i genuinely have no words, this was ya fantasy excellence at its finest that left me breathless and riveted while reading.The side characters have enough depth to make you care what happens to them, but Lee and Annie are both beautifully fleshed out and trigger some intense emotions in you as the reader. Their world is very gray, because every character has their reasons and those reasons make sense even as they are in opposition to one another. They serve in multiple roles: as animal companions, as loving friends/partners, and as weapons of war.