The Fireborne Blade – Cut And Burn

Today we have an exciting novella called The Fireborne Blade by Charlotte Bond. It is the first in a novella series following the exploits of a dragonslayer named Maddileh. She is a rare lady knight, and there aren’t many women in her line of work. This comes with the classic fantasy period piece sexism package of rampant condescension, mansplaining, and general disdain from her fellow knights. When Maddileh commits a grievous breach of honor, she finds that the only way to repair her reputation is to retrieve the fabled Fireborne Blade from its keeper, the legendary dragon The White Lady, or die trying. If history tells us anything, it’s that “die trying” is where to wager your coin.

The Fireborne Blade is very interesting but suffers from trying to do too much in its short page space. The book is divided into halves. One half covers the aforementioned story of Maddileh as she makes her way to The White Lady and tries to recover the sword. The other half is historical records of other dragon-slaying efforts in this world to punctuate how bad Maddileh’s situation is.

The historical record half of this novella rocks. The chapters alternate, and every brief window into the job of dragon-slaying in this world is terrifying and entertaining. It very quickly and effectively helps the reader ground themselves in the world, and each recounting is compelling despite being 1-5 pages long. However, the same cannot be said with Maddileh’s story.

There are too many things happening in this half of a novella to effectively deliver. Bond is trying to characterize Maddileh and three other side characters, tell a quest story from start to finish, have exciting dragon fighting set pieces, and show off several twists that require a lot of explanation. The choice to do this and make it a novella series feels like it is a book that was pulled apart for confusing reasons and made Maddileh really hard to care about. Her characterization just comes off as a mannish woman knight in a men’s world trope because there isn’t enough room for her to be much else. The twists don’t feel impactful because I barely have time to ground myself in the plot before the tables get flipped. I just found myself not caring much about the entire (half) thing.

The prose of the story is great, and Bond is good at setting a clear atmosphere that matches the tone of her story. If only her characters were as interesting as the setting, this would have been one of my favorite reads of the year so far. Yet, I still really loved the dragon-slaying sections. Overall, I give the entire thing a C+ with the clear statement that the novella is very much carried by the historical vignettes. I had enough fun with this that I will continue the series, but I am hoping for novella two to step it up to keep me invested.

Rating: The Fireborne Blade – 7.0/10
-Andrew

An ARC of this book was provided to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The thoughts on this book are my own.