This book review is going to be on Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros from the point of view of an epic fantasy author, not a romance reader.
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This is a romance story with dragons. I think this is important to make abundantly clear at the start of this review because a lot of fantasy fans were blindsided by this. That’s not the book’s fault; the marketing team made it sound like Fourth Wing was going to be more of an epic fantasy with a side of romance.
Here’s the description from Amazon:
Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders.
But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away…because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them.
With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter—like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant.
She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise.
Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom’s protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret.
Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda—because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die.
Understandably, a lot of fantasy readers jumped into the Fourth Wing fully expecting a fantasy book similar to Eregon or Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern and got a steamy romance book instead.
Fourth Wing is a romance book first and a fantasy book second.
Romance as a Genre
Before I get into my actual review of Fourth Wing, I think I need to explain one thing first. There are a couple different ways I talk about romance: romance as in the attraction and growing love between two characters, and romance as a genre. The romance genre in fiction has a very specific structure to it and tropes that are easily recognized and rarely deviated from.
The Fantasy
Dragons
I absolutely loved Violet’s relationships with her dragons. Tairn is an awesome huge grumpy dad dragon and Adarna is adorable. I love how both Violet and Tairn work to accommodate Adarna. The overall design of the dragons isn’t anything new, but I don’t think it’s necessary to always make up new dragons if you do them well.
The World
The world of Fourth Wing is more sparsely developed than, say, the Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson, but that’s not to say there’s nothing there. It may not have different creatures or inventive geography, but the political geography is varied, interesting, and hints at a fair degree of complexity. The political struggles make up the main plot twist towards the end of the book, which surprised me as that makes it seem more like an epic fantasy book than a romance book. I’m curious how Rebecca Yarros is going to handle that balance in later entries.
Magic
I’m a sucker for lightning magic, so I was thrilled when Violet started channeling. I’m curious where the author is going to take this since she has five books planned out.
This magic system is a bit on the looser side, as the magic stems from a mixing of the personalities of both the dragons’ and the riders. I like personalized magic and I hope Rebecca Yarros explores this further in later books. As Violet learns to control her powers, I wonder if those powers will be expanded in some way.
The Romance
I didn’t care for the romance storyline. The romance in Fourth Wing is very similar to other books in the romance genre. One thing I don’t like about many books in the romance genre is that their characters feel quite flat. They exist to serve the romance structure. This is a feature of the romance genre, not a bug. The intended audience for romance novels love the structure and predictability, and they’re not as interested in character growth. The books work for their intended audience, which is not me. I’m perfectly fine with this, but now that there are more romantasy books floating around, it’s something that I have to keep in mind when I read new fantasy books that might have this sort of structure.
I do really enjoy romantic stories, just not books in the romance genre specifically. I thoroughly enjoyed Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson (you can read my review of it here). I also just finished watching the first two seasons of the Bridgerton TV show and absolutely loved the stories. In the second season of Bridgerton, the romance trope that they use is “enemies to lovers,” the same one used by Rebecca Yarros in Fourth Wing. I much preferred the Bridgerton version, though, for several reasons.
One, I actually believed that the two eventual lovers in Bridgerton really did bug the crap out of each other despite being attracted to each other. In Fourth Wing, I had a hard time believing it while Violet was drooling over her supposed enemy in every other line.
Two, both of the characters in Bridgerton went through extensive character growth that eventually allowed them to accept their attraction to each other. In Fourth Wing, Violet and Xaden end up together more because their dragons are mated to each other and therefore the human riders need to protect each other because if one dies, the other probably will die too. There’s not a whole lot of growth going on.
Fantasy readers thrive on character growth and the Hero’s Journey. I’m not at all surprised that many fantasy readers who picked up Fourth Wing were disappointed by it.
The Conclusion
Overall, I actually quite enjoyed the majority of Fourth Wing. I think if the author had put in some character growth and made the romance more about building the characters’ relationship before they hopped into bed with each other, I’d have loved the book.
I just got Iron Flame, the second book in the Empyrean series, from the library the other day and am poised to jump into it. I’m a little apprehensive because I’ve heard a lot of negative things about it being a long, boring slog. We’ll see how it goes.
Stay tuned for my review of Iron Flame!
