Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

This is the first book I’ve had to drop in years.

For starters: I don’t think Fourth Wing is utter trash. I understand the attraction to the tropes it has, and I understand the market. It’s not like it’s downright irredeemably bad, but it’s just so, so not for me, and I’ve had to accept that.

(Keep in mind all of this review is based only on what I’ve read of the novel, which is about half of it.)

I was really pulling to not hate this book since so many people online seem to, but it turns out I’m just a sheep like the rest of them—I did not enjoy this book. I’ve seen many compare it to SJM’s ACOTAR series and draw parallels between the two, and I have to say, even though I didn’t absolutely adore the first book in that series either, this book doesn’t hold a candle to even that novel for me.

In ACOTAR, the world building is interesting, beautiful, aesthetic, and expansive. It’s a little derivative, sure, but it’s bright and colorful and very vibrant, simmering with magic, full of mystery and life. The world building here, while certainly there and even arguably a better part of the book, is much duller. We spend all of what I read at a dragon school, essentially, and I wasn’t really into that. The idea of the school itself is good, but the actual descriptive setting feels very confined and almost effortless, and the way it’s described is quite bland.

ACOTAR’s plot is its weakest component to me, so maybe the Empyrean series has it beat there somewhere down the line—but so far, hundreds of pages into the book, no. There are some standout scenes, like Violet being cool at the trials or meeting and bonding with her dragons, but not nearly as many as I’d like. There’s also these trials the school holds that were mildly interesting, but when everyone in them isn’t worth rooting for, how interesting can they be? When there’s no task at hand, it’s easy to feel that the book drags and goes nowhere, kind of like a filler episode. It takes its sweet time, even when not much is happening, and the info-dumping in this book should be charged criminally.

Almost all aspects of the plot were just downright uninteresting to me. I don’t care about Violet’s family. I don’t care about the Academy of dragon riders. I don’t care about the romance. I don’t care about the random political drama simmering behind the scenes—I don’t care about any of it, at all. Maybe it gets better down the line, but I felt zero investment halfway through.

ACOTAR has good/decent characters, and even the less well written or fleshed out ones are usually at least likable or interesting. Conversely, the characters in Fourth Wing are quite bad—especially the side characters, who the author acts like we should like or care about for some reason. The best one is Violet’s friend Rhiannon (I hope that’s her name—I listened to the audiobook) and she is okay, in that she’s pleasant and seems chill, which again makes her the best one. I could not name a singular other one that was even 10% written besides maybe Xaden’s pink-haired friend. There are so many names thrown around in this first half of the novel and almost none of them matter; it’s very frustrating. And some characters just exist to be antagonistic or annoying, which is always uninteresting.

Almost all of the main characters, I don’t like. Our main gal Violet is an exception, she’s okay. I like the EDS representation the author wrote into her character based on her own experiences with the disability; I thought that was very intelligent and well done. The way Violet is written to struggle through her pain and pushing her physical limits was actually written really solidly. But I don’t feel compelled to root for her just because she’s the underdog; that’s not enough for me. She’s likable sometimes, and she can be funny and witty, but nothing much besides her stubbornness stands out about her, and her dialogue is so, SO bad at its worst. Those scenes of her reciting all the information during stressful moments had me curling into myself with the weight of my cringe. She’s not terrible, but unfortunately, she’s such a walking trope sometimes. She’s about Feyre levels of good, I’d say, which is decent but not great. She carried the book for sure.

Speaking of walking tropes—guys, I’m sorry, but Xaden is awful.

We are living in a world where Sasuke Uchiha was plagiarized and written into a smutty dragon romance political drama—that is what he is. We get it, he’s hot—because boy oh boy, does Violet’s awful inner dialogue make sure we know it—but here’s a shocker: that’s not enough to make him a good character. He is such a brooding, douchey edgelord, and I do not care about him so far. I’m sure he’s good deep down or whatever the hell, but on top of everything, he’s also just so boring. More than half the book is over, and all I know about him is that he probably cares about his people—probably. He is mysterious and maybe slightly snarky in his best moments, but besides that, he’s a bad character. He also has a really dumb name for Violet; he calls her Violence, and it’s dumb and bad. He’s clearly very hard and jaded and Violet’s going to help him overcome that when they finally bang and fall in love, blah blah blah—it’s bad, it’s basic, it’s underwhelming. It’s been done before. It’s boring.

That being said—I ship it. Because I like it? No. But because the alternative is absolutely unacceptable.

When Violet joins the rider’s quadrant, she meets up with her best friend Dain. Dain is—mark my words—one of the most heinous, awful, irritating characters I’ve ever come across in a fantasy novel. He is TERRIBLE. I was legitimately fuming whenever I came across him.

Dain is a walking, talking version of the already bad, already awful trope of wanting Violet (the girl) to be safe and to stay away from danger—in the most dangerous job in their world—taken to an almost comedic extreme. But it goes so beyond him just wanting to protect her. He thinks her not only under-qualified for the job, but an absolute lost cause. Dain has zero faith in Violet, and that is his entire function as a character. It’s nearly villainous, how goddamn up her ass he is romantically while being so anxious and stressed the fuck out that Violet will drop dead at any given moment. He does not think she is capable of doing anything but reading and looking pretty, no matter how many times she proves him wrong—which is a lot, even only halfway through the book. He clearly hates that she wants to be a rider and even actively tries to sabotage her place in the quadrant for her “safety” because he’s “worried” and “over-protective” when really, he’s just a creep and a misogynist with no faith at all in the talents of his supposed best friend. He’s awful, and I won’t let him get with Violet. I was so happy when Violet snapped out of her crush on him early. I’d much rather see her with Sasuke, because at least he sees Violet as a human being.

Some quick compliments: I do think the concept of the academy is kind of interesting. My favorite part of the book by far was the internal dialogues Violet’s dragons have with her. The dragons were cool. I like the classifications they had with color and tail type. Violet is decent. I dislike literally almost everything else.

1/5