Genres: Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Bi/pansexual MC
PoV: Third-person, past-tense
Published on: 28th May 2024
ISBN: 1250290325
Goodreads
Kill the dragon. Find the blade. Reclaim your honor.
It’s that, or end up like countless knights before her, as a puddle of gore and molten armor.
Maddileh is a knight. There aren’t many women in her line of work, and it often feels like the sneering and contempt from her peers is harder to stomach than the actual dragon slaying. But she’s a knight, and made of sterner stuff.
A minor infraction forces her to redeem her honor in the most dramatic way possible, she must retrieve the fabled Fireborne Blade from its keeper, legendary dragon the White Lady, or die trying. If history tells us anything, it's that “die trying” is where to wager your coin.
Maddileh’s tale contains a rich history of dragons, ill-fated knights, scheming squires, and sapphic love, with deceptions and double-crosses that will keep you guessing right up to its dramatic conclusion. Ultimately, The Fireborne Blade is about the roles we refuse to accept, and of the place we make for ourselves in the world.
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Highlights
~dragon history > human present
~beware mixing magical items
~absolutely zero questions are answered
~someone please kick this squire in the nuts already
~don’t judge this one by its cover
No, no, no, ABSOLUTELY NOT.
Hard fail. The only reason I actually pushed through and finished this was that it was so short I figured I might as well. But maybe I shouldn’t have, because the twist-reveal-and-ending was actually a really cool idea…executed so poorly. And I find that more annoying than a book that is just bad and boring with no interesting ideas in it.
THIS COULD HAVE BEEN SO GREAT.
BUT IT ISN’T.
It starts well, with a transcript of an interview between a knight and the mage council; the knight is giving an accounting of how he slayed his most recent dragon. It quickly becomes clear that dragons in this world emanate strange and dangerous magic that makes traversing their lairs very dangerous – those a dragon kills become ‘dragon ghosts’ who unintentionally guard their killer, and if you get past them and succeed at killing the dragoon, well…dragon corpses are even more terribly dangerous, and there’s no way to predict what kind of dangerous before the dragon is dead.
This is all reasonably interesting. What’s more interesting is that the mages reveal that this particular knight is a lying scumbag, and it did not go down the way he said it did.
But forget all that, because that has no bearing at all on the actual story, which is very, very TiredTM.
Nothing about Maddileh distinguishes her from The Woman Who Wants To Be A Knight template. We have seen this exact same character THOUSANDS of times before, facing exactly the same challenges in exactly the same setting; a quasi-Medieval patriarchy where women can’t be knights or mages. We do not know how Maddileh managed to become a knight despite that, especially since her mother doesn’t approve; it may have something to do with the king liking her a lot, but we have no idea why he does and we don’t see their relationship at all. We do not know how Maddileh earned her epithet, the Knight of the Stairs – there’s one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to her possibly defending her younger brothers from monsters by guarding a staircase, but we don’t get the story behind or around that. We do not see what Maddileh’s life as a knight is actually like: where does she live, who pays for her horses and tourney fees and (presumably expensive if they must reflect her rank) clothes, does she have the respect or friendship of any knights or do they all hate her, does she spend her time riding around the kingdom helping the needy or is she strictly a ‘dancing attendance upon the king’ type of knight?
We don’t get any of that, because she’s just a cardboard cut-out, a prop – and not a good one. For crying out loud, she has exactly one personality trait – she doesn’t like or trust magic.
THAT IS LITERALLY IT.
We get two timelines, more or less; the present, where Maddileh and her deeply suspicious squire are in the dragon’s lair, hunting the Blade; and another starting six months before, showing us – kinda – how Maddileh got the knowledge and tools she needed to potentially survive taking on this particular dragon. In between, we also get excerpts from an in-universe book on dragons and their history. That was fairly interesting – although maddeningly, there isn’t even any speculation on how dragons went from being sentient sapient beings to mindless animals – but neither timeline of the actual story was.
The squire has his own agenda, and frankly, it is a garbage agenda. Besides the reveal being info-dumped on us (like very nearly EVERYTHING ELSE IN THIS STUPID BOOK) it made very little sense, and almost all of it hinged on information the reader had no way of knowing beforehand – the worst kind of reveal. (Do not get me started on the fucking BOWL.)
And then – the twist. No spoilers, but it was legitimately a really cool reveal, albeit again, pure info-dump. But then came the second twist, the bigger, much more important one, and –
Look: it was rushed. It happened way too fast to be as impactful as it should have been. There was zero explanation as to how it worked, what exactly they did. And it was written in plain, blunt language that drained it of any possible mystique, any sense of awe. Capped off with a Very FeministTM oration that was clearly supposed to fill me with Girl Power vibes, but fell flat on its face because a) I didn’t care enough about the characters to care and b) I was still trying to understand wtf just happened and what the ramifications of it were supposed to be.
(At this point it will probably not surprise you when I say that my questions were not answered.)
Also, I’m calling bs on that blurb, because there is no amount of mental gymnastics you can perform that would justify describing Fireborne Blade as containing ‘sapphic love’. Even the Puritans wouldn’t see anything to object about in the ‘relationship’ (a term I use extremely loosely) between Maddileh and the woman who is not, even if I squint and turn the book upside-down, her love interest. The freaking Westboro Baptists wouldn’t bat an eye at handing this book to their kids (unless they have issues with women knights or dragons or anything else that isn’t queerness). There is maybe a moment – another one of those blink-and-you’ll-miss-its – where Maddileh has a reaction to being touched by a pretty girl. But it’s so brief and so vague that I could argue in a court of law that Maddileh instead had a moment of anxiety, or wariness, or FREAKING GAS, and every person in that jury box would agree with me!
What romance? What are you talking about? They don’t have any kind of relationship, never mind a romance!
Honestly, if I didn’t know going into this that the MC was supposed to be attracted to women, I would have had no idea she was queer. It’s so not-present I’m not even 100% comfortable calling this a queer book. I will do so, because my rule is that if the MC is queer, it’s a queer book, and if you know how to interpret that one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment – if only because you’ve read the blurb – you know what we’re supposed to take away from it, ie that Maddileh is attracted to women as well as men (which is much more strongly established).
If you didn’t read the blurb, though, you really would have no clue.
‘Sapphic love’. FFS. Gods, I hope whatever idiots wrote the blurb edit it before release day. THAT IS WILDLY INACCURATE AND MISLEADING, PEOPLE. (Although the blurb, of course, is not Bond’s fault, unlike everything else in this book.)
This story desperately needed to be a full novel: every aspect of it, except maybe the dragons themselves, is underdeveloped and has no room to breathe. The breakneck pace of a novella did Fireborne Blade absolutely no favours; it needed more pages so it could slow down and immerse us in the world, give us time to connect to the characters – give the characters space to have actual personalities! In its current form, what is original and interesting comes too late (in the form of the plot twists) or in too-small doses (the info on the dragons) to be worth bothering with. There’s nothing in the characters, world, or plot to hold a reader’s attention, and the prose is too weak and basic to make up for that lack.
Definitely one to skip!
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