crothe77 's review for:

Mageborn by Jessica Thorne
dark emotional medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
 
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy

Mageborn by Jessica Thorne is a third person dual-POV romantic fantasy with a mystery element. Grace is a mageborn who hides the fact that after her magic was drained, it somehow came back. Bastien is the cousin of the king and the Lord of Thorns. When the two meet when Grace is looking for her dear friend Kai, it sets them on a path to learn what is actually happening in the kingdom.

One of the rules of the kingdom is that only a child of the same bloodline as Bastien and his cousin can sit on the throne. Because of this, the queen, who has yet to get pregnant and whose husband seems reluctant to even touch her, drugs Bastien so he can make her pregnant. It’s not super explicit, but there is enough on the page from Bastien’s POV followed by clearly labelling this as sexual assault that it could trigger some readers. We’re in the hazy thoughts of Bastien as this is all happening and it’s very well-done but also very uncomfortable. 

Bastien and Grace’s romance started before the book opens as they have been meeting each other in the Maegen, a sort of in-between magical world that they can enter in their dreams. Within this dream world, they have grown very close but were not aware of who the other person was in real life as they had never seen each other before. When they do meet in real life, Grace does not trust Bastien at all and his status as the king’s cousin puts a damper on their relationship developing further in real life initially.

The mageborn are people born with powers, often elemental magic, but there are other abilities, such as the ability to leech magic from others and take it into yourself. The mageborn are collared and sometimes bought and sold like slaves, completely at the whims of the people who bought them. This environment makes it more imperative for Grace to hide the fact that her fire magic is coming back at the start of the story and leads her to even asking a friend to leech the magic right out of her, something that is both horrifying and also understandable.

Content warning for brief depictions of sexual assault, violence against children, enslavement, and mentions of human experimentation

I would recommend this to fans of darker Romantasy and readers of fantasy romance who want a mystery element 

 
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