The Reborn Prince by Julianne Munich

Mages in the Mundane Series Book 1

Book Blog Tour – Book Review

Book Summary

He was a prince, forced into a new life as a pauper.

Luc, a poor but vain young man in 1775 Paris, is confused by his dreams of gilded ballrooms and unknown people in lace and jewels. What’s more, everything before the past two years is a hazy fog in his mind. His only link is Aunt Mathilde, who gives him few answers.

What he doesn’t know is that ‘Aunt Mathilde’ is in fact his mother—and a Sorceress. She keeps him captive under her magical veil, desperate to both protect him and punish him for the evil deeds of his royal past.

When disease leaves Luc scarred and weakened, he feels his life is over. He pushes away his humble friends, including Emilie, a young housemaid.

Emilie, scarred from smallpox, is resigned to life as a spinster. Yet, she sees beauty and joy in life and understands Luc’s despair beneath his bitter, beastly attitude.

Unless Luc can embrace his inner strength, care about others, and love unselfishly, he risks destroying himself once more. This is Book 1 of the Mages in the Mundane historical fantasy series and is an adult twist on Beauty and the Beast, with family drama, a secret underground society of Mages, and a sweet love story. The novel ends with a lead-in to the sequel.

Rating

5/5

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My Thoughts

Julianne’s writing style is mostly easy to read, especially if you understand French. I was committed to the story quickly and wanted to know what was going to happen next with Prince Renaud and Mathilde. The whole time I felt like I was sitting on the edge of my seat.

The storyline was brilliant and I loved how Julianne weaved the threads of the story together. I felt captured by it and wanted to know what the outcome was going to be. Even though it’s a Beauty and the Beast retelling, it only had elements of that fairytale. It was not a direct retelling, so you couldn’t guess the different outcomes.

The story kept me guessing all the time. It’s not often that I can’t guess any of the outcomes or plots but with this book, I couldn’t guess any! The different worlds that Julianne pulled us into sounded beautiful and tragic at the same time. We always see Paris, France as this beautiful and romantic place but Julianne gives you another side of it as well. I had no problem living myself into the different settings that she created.

At first, you think that Prince Renaud/Luc is a real piece of work and that he has evil at the root of him. But as you keep reading you find that he seems to have been treated badly all through his life by his brother, which then stole the woman he loved. You then start to understand his hatred for him. You start to slowly but surely feel sorry for the life that he seemed to have lived in the castle. Julianne definitely wanted us to know that Luc was full of himself. He made me think of Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. I couldn’t understand how Luc/Renaud just left without saying goodbye to his ‘aunt’ and the same for Mathilde that didn’t say goodbye to her son before leaving.

The dialogue was interesting and mostly easy to understand. I know the author gave translations of the French at the beginning of the book but it was too much effort to go back and forth the whole time. I was still able to understand the story so I wasn’t too bothered by it. I enjoyed all the other characters in the story. Emilie might be a maid but she definitely did not back down with men in her own class and I loved that she wasn’t a meek walkover. Adelaide made me chuckle quite often and she sounded adorable. I won’t go through all the characters but Julianne wrote each one with their own personalities that were vastly different from each other and I thought they rounded the story out very well and made for a good read.

This is book 1 of the Mages in the Mundane series. Book two is The Ice Mage and I can’t wait to read it. This book ends on a cliffhanger and has a lead-in to the next book in the series. I feel like this ending was the calm before the storm that was about to hit their lives. I don’t think we will know the full story until we reach the end of book 3 in the series. Book 3 is the final book in the series.

I would recommend The Reborn Prince to anyone that loves Fairytale Retelling, Fantasy, Romance and stories of magic, Mages and Witches.

Book Links:

Amazon
Goodreads

Author Links:

Goodreads
Julie Jeanette’s Writing Blog
Twitter
Instagram
Facebook
Amazon
Weebly

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