If you are even remotely on bookish social media, then you are aware of Fourth Wing. It’s been much-hyped and sold out and everywhere I look online there are rave reviews for this YA-fantasy-romance.
I am not here to yuck anyone’s yum. If you read Fourth Wing and you loved it, I am totally happy for you. I want people to love what they read.
This was not a book that worked for me, though, and I suspect I’m probably not the only one who didn’t love it. I made it about 45% of the way though before I finally decided this was just going to be a slog for me and I gave up.
There were two main reasons I could not get interested in this book
- The fantasy archetypes and tropes at work in the plot, and
- The pacing
Fourth Wing is set in a fantasy world where the country of Navarre protects its borders with an elite army of dragon riders. When they are approximately of real-world college age, the young people of Navarre enter one of four quadrants in order to serve their country. Violet Sorrengail is small and accident prone, and by all accounts should enter the Scribe Quadrant. Instead, Violet’s mother, a general, sends her to the Rider’s Quadrant where she’ll probably be killed before graduation (side note: Violet’s mom is not great).
If Violet survives her time at the War College she will hopefully be selected by a dragon to be its bonded rider.
I don’t fully understand why the War College is so invested in killing off its cadets (or having them kill each other). Fratricide is openly welcomed in order to weed out the “weak” recruits. At the same time we’re reminded frequently that there are fewer riders and fewer dragons every year, and I believe this is definitely a case of causation, not correlation. Also don’t they need people for other jobs? Who makes lunch?
Violet shouldn’t be in the Rider Quadrant. She’s very academic and would have excelled as a scribe, like her father. It would appear that everyone in the Rider Quadrant knows this, and multiple people offer to help her find a way to get out and get over to the Scribe’s where, frankly, things sound a lot better. Violet refuses on the grounds that her mom would find a way to send her back (why?) and because she stubbornly wants to prove She Can Do It (why?).
Sometimes, in the real world, you cannot do the thing even though you really believe in yourself. I have a friend who convinced herself she could accomplish a Tough Mudder through the power of belief and positive thinking, and then she broke some ribs.
Cadet training involves something like the balance beam from hell as well as a Ninja Warrior course, all while the other cadets are trying to murder you. Somehow Violet makes it through, mostly because she’s clearly The Chosen One.
The Chosen One is a trope seen often in YA fantasy and it doesn’t really work for me. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with it; it’s just not a trope I particularly enjoy and this book relies heavily on it. For me The Chosen One trope allows the reader to accept that the heroine is somehow more special than her peers without actually doing much to prove it. In Violet’s case she’s clever and brave (if foolishly so IMO) but so are a lot of the other cadets. Violet even has the special hair (the ends are always silver regardless of how short she cuts it) that indicates a The Chosen One heroine. She won’t give up, she has fun hair, and two hot guys like her so she must be our heroine, I guess.
The first half of the book is a boarding school book meets Hunger Games where alliances are formed, Violet injures herself a lot, and well meaning people worry after her, but she is determined to prove her mother wrong even though she hates it and will probably die anyway. It really crawled for me, probably because the stakes seemed so ridiculous that I didn’t care that much anyway. I mean, her first day of school is walking the balance beam of death while the guy behind her tries to stab her, and that’s a level of intensity I’m just not here for.
Also…why? Why is this entire society’s military founded on twenty-year-old’s killing each other? If the weak have to be weeded out, why not put them in a job somewhere else? Wouldn’t you just have a ton of sociopathic dragon riders at the end?
To be fair, some of this could have been answered if I had finished the book, but I didn’t.
It takes almost half the book for Violet to survive Dragon Basic Training and finally meet and bond to a dragon. It was at that point I gave up. If I wasn’t invested when the talking dragons showed up, I wasn’t going to be invested, period.
There’s also a romance element here between Violet and her Wing Leader Xaden, who is the meanest and scariest of the wing leaders, and also her mom got his family killed. So that’s going to make the holidays real awkward. Violet is so attracted to him he makes her scalp tingle. Like Head and Shoulders, I guess. The tingling means the romance is working?
Anyway, if Fourth Wing is your jam I am genuinely happy for you. For me it was too much about someone in a crappy situation insisting on staying in that crappy situation for reasons that didn’t make a lot of sense, alongside slow plot development, mixed with some tropes I don’t love. There were far too many times where I questioned why something was happening, and the text never revealed nor hinted at a satisfactory reason beyond “because reasons,” so I moved on.
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> If Violet survives her time at the War College she will hopefully be selected by a dragon to be its bonded rider.
That’s straight out of Anne McCaffrey, no?
It’s like those Knight tournaments when they fight to the death. Surely they need as many Knights as possible to fight the big bad at the end?
Anyway, two of my pet hates in this: academy setting and everyone has it in for the heroine, I’ll think I’ll skip this one.
I suggest Moniquill Blackgoose’s To Shape a Dragon’s Breath as an alternative (and possibly a palate cleanser), though to @Kit’s point, it is set in a school for dragon riders, and there is hostility toward the heroine. It hasn’t gotten much attention, which I think is a real shame.
@LisaM: I also recommend TO SHAPE A DRAGON’S BREATH, although I will say there is a reason (a hateful one) prompting the hostility toward the heroine. And the dragon already chose her, so the school has limited (still hateful) options. Unlike FOURTH WING, we’re meant to learn from and understand what transpired, how we got here, imo. The audio book is fabulous because we’re able to hear how the native names are pronounced.
The questions are not answered, though of course there’s a revelation at the end that Everything Is Not As It Seems, which the reader picked up on around page two, probably because they’re (hopefully) not a sociopath with inconsistent character traits. Also I’m not sure why everyone continues to call the heroine weak after she’s shown she’s clearly not, but it’s annoying.
This book bothered me so much for all the reasons in the post and I wish that like Elyse I had DNF’d it. I slogged through the whole thing to see where the romance would go and it went both exactly where you’d expect and was fairly boring/unbelievable…plus the sex, while explicit was pretty standard (and I found it boring since I didn’t like either romantic lead). Also the dialogue (inner and outer) was…not to my taste. If you read the first chapter, that tone continues for the entire book.
There was also a vague attempt to show what living with chronic pain was like, and I found it ineffective; basically our heroine was fine unless the plot required her not to be.
Anyway, I should have known better than to continue reading as soon as I read about the **super special** hair but alas, lesson learned hopefully.
I flew through this book and enjoyed it, which surprised me as I thought the Hunger Games books were too violent (still do). This seemed a bit like Hunger Games meets Hogwarts to me. I agree with all the points made in the review. Why encourage the candidates to kill each other? Surely some extras will be needed to replace those that get killed or injured in training? But I liked the main characters, wanted Violet to survive, and, of course, was mainly in the mood for some talking dragons. If you like talking dragons, check out HIS MAJESTY’S DRAGON by Naomi Novik.
After a year of bullying from friends I finally read Fourth Wing last month and it was a very *shrug emoji* experience. It was fine, but not groundbreaking, and I was honestly expecting way more.
(even ACOTAR was better imho)
This keeps getting recommended to me because talking dragons, and I keep rejecting it because YA. I didn’t know about the super special hair, tho. I am a sucker for indicators of superiority of the amethyst eye type. No joke. That whole initial pulp novel/eugenics moment in pop culture, which is obviously terrible and troublesome makes for some weirdly soothing literature to me, probably because of its obviousness. I think sometimes I get nervous when I can’t spot the biases? And sometimes I feel gaslit when a pseudo-historical retcons reality, like what Florida is up to. So sometimes when right out of the gate it’s like, oh ok this is that garbage trope and oh hey there’s the Prussian military ideology, oh wow still with the anti-Semetic goblins ok, it’s like a relief, because the cautionary warnings are built in? Idk how to explain it. Anyway. I find a protagonist with magical hair entertaining and hilarious. I can’t however extend that attitude all the way to The Chosen One, which is such a non-starter for me I basically can’t read YA.
So glad it’s not just me! I’m not a fantasy fan but I really enjoy this author. So I tried. DNF. Your thoughts reflect mine perfectly. Yarros has some great books but not this one.
I have to mention the SHEER NUMBER of F bombs in the book! I never met a situation that couldn’t be improved by a well placed profanity, but this was lazy writing. The world was interesting, I hope the dragons kill everyone and do their own thing, and I 10000% agree that To Shape a Dragon’s Breath is the superior dragon bonding special relationship book.
As someone who always goes looking for contrary reviews when I don’t like a book that got a lot of positive press or has really good ratings on Goodreads, I find this thread fascinating.
Personally, I really enjoyed it, wasn’t bothered by the plot gaps/questions, and am looking forward to reading the sequel. (The hero is a bit too perfect, but it’s manageable.)
I’m with Fashionably Evil on this one. Was I entertained? Yes, I was. But then I don’t mind Chosen One narratives. They’re not something I seek out but honestly I feel like every MC is a Chosen One because there’s a story about them that I’m reading.
I don’t understand why they want to kill all the 20-year-old fighters except the most horrible. Maybe the most horrible are also the most easily manipulated? Get rid of the smart ones hence the insistence on the necessity of getting rid of Violet?
On any case, I will likely read book two.
I agree Yarros has written better books, but this is a fine example of the thing it is. Pop books are like pop music.
I agree, just reading the first few pages on Amazon and I was totally turned off by the carefully constructed conflict and set up, that even in that short amount of time was filled with contradictions. The world building felt like cardboard, and the characters YA caricatures of real people. My impression of course is colored by decades of fantasy reading, and I suppose what are tired tropes and weak character building to me will be new and intriguing to someone who has experienced less of the great fantasy genre.
I am with FashionablyEvil, didn’t mind this book at all. I think it showed up in my library at a point where I just wanted something as unlike real life as possible, and this fit the bill. Looking forward to the sequel. While the heroine is just okay, I really liked the hero.
Someone was recommending this to me a while back in exactly the way that would lead me to never read the thing they were recommending (a. didn’t say WHY they liked it and b. were so aggressively insistent that I would love it that it twanged my ornery gene hard).
This review is like, whooo, nope. Not my jam even in the slightest.
Lol. I JUST read this one. Slog is a very accurate description here. It’s not poorly written or have simplistic dialogue as a detractor. Just glacial pacing and heroine who is always “right place, right time” to save the day or be pivotal to something major. It reads pretty YA and tries hard to be more crossover ala COURT OF THORNS AND ROSES. I did finish it hoping for some resolution but I won’t try the next due to pacing issues.
I read this book months ago, pretty much as soon as I started seeing the hype. I enjoyed it and found it compelling while reading it, but at the end realized there was nothing special about it: the romantic arc is almost exactly like JLA’s From Blood and Ash series, except extended for a painful amount of time. Which is not to say that that series isn’t good, but again, it’s nothing ground breaking, just the same old bananas plots and problematic men/governments. Fun to read, but nothing special.
@kkw, If you like magical hair, I highly recommend Hex and the City by Kate Johnson. It’s the second book in a series but you can jump in with this one without feeling lost. The heroine, Poppy, is a witch who doesn’t seem to have any witchy qualities except that unwitting chaos follows her AND, she has magical, sentient hair (this was discovered early on when her decidedly normal mom tried to cut it and the hair grabbed the scissors and threw them across the room LOL). The book itself has somewhat mixed reviews. I loved it, but the plot is a bit bonkers and it leans more toward witchy chick lit than romance.
Here’s one of my favorite quotes from the book:
– after she breaks up with the MMC: “She wore his t-shirt with a picture of Gandalf on it and her hair was quietly eating Doritos crumbs.”
I read this AND ‘To Shape A Dragon’s Breath’ in the same week, because DragonSchool was what my brain needed.
I describe this one as the author writing Temeraire/Scolomance fanfic. Half the royalties should have been sent to Novik.
The author took all the Pern tropes she liked–teenagers/young adults as the Chosen Ones, telepathic dragons that choose their riders, said telepathy extending to transmitted lust at times–and threw them into a giant vat of tropes and military jargon. I was split between being fascinated by the dragons, and trying to parse how a military force with a 25% deadly attrition rate (even before they’re deemed ready to fight!) is worth it for the kingdom. Oh, and keeping tally marks of how many times the MMC’s “gold-flecked onyx eyes” were mentioned.
It’s not great literature, but sometimes I want trash, and this is fantasy trash with dragons and The Smooching of the Nemesis, so I’m at least interested in book 2.
I enjoyed “The Fourth Wing”, until it got to the last few chapters and switched from being Violet’s POV to another character’s. I felt that that choice undermined the impact of the cliffhanger ending and I seriously could not care less about what this character thinks about anything.
I liked FW enough to be willing to try the next book, but I’m not going to any release parties or buying a copy – I found it in the library catalog and got my hold in early, so I won’t have to wait long for it.
What I am glad about is that this has helped kind of revive some bookish excitement and let people who love a thing gather together for it – something I’ve missed since RT ended.
If we’re gonna go for dragon fantasy romance books, I definitely liked “To Shape A Dragon’s Breath” by Moniquill Blackgoose MUCH more because the heroine is Indigenous, she loves her family and culture, and she’s pushing back against colonialism and colonialist attitudes while her dragon grows. There is some romance, but because the heroine is all of 15, it doesn’t take over the book.
@Liz,
I was the exact opposite. I liked the heroine and didn’t give two figs about the hero. LOL I read books for the heroines, tbh – it’s part of my post-2016 “I’m sick of hearing what men think about everything” general refusal to read books by or about men (with occasional exceptions made if they are otherwise part of a marginalized community).
This sounds like Divergent with dragons which is not a compliment.
I absolutely adored and loved this book, but some of the plot revolving around the weak being weeded out and not sent elsewhere in the army where soldiers seemed desperately needed? Yes, that did not make sense. I loved the book so much I am sure I am just making excuses, but I kind of chalked it up to “there are a lot of traditions in our world that don’t make any sense and would not hold up to close scrutiny either”).
Also the author (and I believe some of her children) has the same condition as Violet and I think she very deliberately wrote the character to be at a severe physical disadvantage but try to overcome it by out thinking her fellow cadets and bending but not breaking the rules. I am not disagreeing with Elyse’s quote from the review “Sometimes, in the real world, you cannot do the thing even though you really believe in yourself.” but I don’t think that is the narrative the author wanted to tell here. I totally get why it might not work for some readers, though.
And the hero, total swoon for me. I don’t think it is too much of a spoiler to say partway through the book Violet decides she wants to stay and compete and gets tired of the people who want to help her get out rather than help her stay. The hero sees clearly how to help and how to support what she wants
Needless to say, I am eagerly awaiting the release of book 2 (already pre-ordered)!!!
I’ve read exactly none of the dragon books in this thread, just popping in to say if you’re sick of the Chosen One trope, check out THE REST OF US JUST LIVE HERE by Patrick Ness. It’s focused on the regular kids trying to get through senior year while the Chosen Ones are mentioned in chapter headings like “In which they blow up the high school, again.” CW for mental health struggles and bittersweet coming of age stuff if you’re not in the mood for that emotional wringer. Maybe just read the chapter headings, they’re snarktastic.
I’m sad to see that many people totally hate this book! Oh well, I loved it. I borrowed the audio book from the library and listened while I worked, I was sucked in right away as I was not looking for anything too deep. I finished the audio book and went and bought a copy of it for myself and am reading it. Pre ordered part 2. It was exactly what I needed and the right time for me.
Also on book 3 of ACoTaR and am really slogging with it♀️.
This was such a good review – I agree with all of these points even though I finished the book and ended up liking it. I seldom enjoy YA/NA but this one was actually pretty fun once I started reading it as getting between a series of milestones rather than one long narrative.
I was also in the right mood for it. At an important point in the story I did pause and think, “normally I wouldn’t be on board for this but………hell yeah :D” Ymmv tho, I’m not always in the mood for it myself.
The characters do all sound exactly the same and you do have to handwave pretty much all of the extremely inefficient cadet training and never wonder why an entire kingdom of people doesn’t mind flinging their young loved ones at near certain and terrible death. If it helps, some of it makes a bit more sense if you think of the people/riders as side characters in the conflict. The dragons are the main actors in the war, the people are just tools (it’s the same amount of people vying for less dragons, not less people and less dragons, and given later revelations I’m holding out for dragon politics accounting for the disparity). The kingdom is only able to maintain its borders because they happen to live near the dragons’ sacred hatching grounds, etc etc.
Jack was nearly inexplicable . If anything he was a liability, I don’t know why everyone didn’t just agree to boot him off a cliff. I thought it was slow in the beginning too, although not because of the pacing, more because the writing is a little dry. I thought it was actually pretty well paced…or it might be because I felt clever for spotting all the timers she was setting: 2 weeks until Challenges, 2 months until Threshing and some others.
I’m looking forward to book two, I am number 86 in the holds wait list haha xD I think I will get it before the year is out.
I thought of it more as Scholomance-lite (Mother: I won’t be able to talk to you for two years! Reader: But you’re right there, why not?) with added Hunger Games/HP/Twilight vibes.
I did finish, but I did also try to make someone else read it so I could whinge about how stupid the world-building was. I suspect one of the seemingly stupid decisions is going to be a big twist further down the series, but mostly the school makes no sense.
And a lot of stuff is heavily telegraphed – the only point at which I was genuinely unsure what would happen is where they are going through the dragons the riders could bond with, and it’s all ‘This dragon, that dragon, Supercool Dragon that probably won’t bond with anyone, this dragon, that dragon, Very Mysterious Dragon that no-one has bonded with ever.’
I could not work out whether she would bond with the Supercool or the Very Mysterious dragon, in the unlikely event she survived that long.
I probably will read the next one, but I expect to be annoyed by it.
MMcA – yes! that was the one part that confused me in the book, which super special dragon was she going to get…and then it turned out to be a non-issue because she pulled a Menolly from DragonSinger
I was surprised, towards the end of the book, where the hero mentions he’s in his early 20s. I’d thought all of these students were about 12. Based on the way they talk and act, they certainly seem much more immature than their stated ages.
Your post made me LOL.
Reading the book now. Not something I would usually choose but picked it up because of all the hype. It is a bit strange.
I finished this book and my reaction is definitely “meh” to it. I will probably continue to read the series because I personally found it an “easy read” (which is more of where I’m aiming instead of genuine fixation in the storylines/quality of storytelling) but I also found a lot of the tropes are very ACOTAR-esque. Like if ACOTAR was set in dragon land and there was a school involved and we just remove Tamlin from the equation altogether. Dark broody love interest who takes a personal sacrifice for his “inner circle”, magical “wards” and mind-speak and putting up “shields” all felt very reminiscent of ACOTAR. I also didn’t like the fact that they make it out like Xaden and Violet are mortal enemies for an extremely brief time and then there is no smooth transition to leaving that plot point behind, they’re suddenly both just sexually teasing eachother for the majority of the book. Again, easy read, but the plotline felt really juvenile and paired with the *arguably* explicit sex scenes it has me a bit confused who this book is meant to be read by.
I am so glad to find this review. I was starting to think there was something seriously wrong with me, I could not get into the book. I barely finished it for a book club and hated almost every minute of it. Everybody I know loves and raves about this book and I just couldn’t see why, my sister finished it in less than 2 days and my other one has re-read it 3 or 4 times. Usually we are pretty similar in our reading but not this time. There is nothing new or unique about this story, and everything was projected so far out. It might as well have been painted in neon.
Thanks for putting these thoughts into words! I try to like all books and this one is just missing the mark for me; enough for me to try to find other people who also thought the same because all I’ve been seeing are rave reviews for the most part. I’m close to the end of the book, and I’ll finish it, but definitely think the book is simplistic, unrealistic, and not rooted in human *actual* behavior (ex you’re at the front lines of a WAR and your sneaking off to visit a friends family, AND your war hero sister catches you and decides to join you? That part was the unraveling for me). I love “dragon books” as I call them, and do enjoy the dragon part of this book, but I’ll keep searching for richer worlds, plots, and characters. I welcome suggestions:)