I told myself I was going to avoid solo book reviews on this blog especially for books in a series (because I’d rather do full a series review), but I hated this book so much that I needed to rant about it. 😂 So if you liked this book, be warned: This will be an angry review. I will be trashing this book a lot.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Here’s what I imagine happened: I believe that Rebecca Yarros wanted to write an edgy fantasy book with dragons targeted for a YA audience. She probably had a word cloud of ideas and no actual details prepared. Fine, maybe there was a rough outline. Her characters were written on the fly, but she knew she wanted a heroine who was not like the other girls. In 2023, she finally decided that it was time to publish her book… but it was missing something… ah, spice is getting really big in the book world. She went back to make her characters adults and made them super horny. And BAM, Fourth Wing was born. ✨

Do you want to read a book about a bunch of adults (who act and speak like horny teenagers) running around trying to kill each other?

Maybe you do, and I don’t blame you because that honestly sounds like a fun time. But personally, I need one basic question answered before I can enjoy this kind of plot: WHY are they trying to kill each other?

In the case of Fourth Wing, there is no point. This book supposedly features the best, the brightest, and the toughest kids adults (I’m going to have a problem with this) going through the dragon riders’ quadrant of the Big Bad War College^TM. This is allegedly the most revered sector of the college, and those who are admitted here are trained in magic and eventually go to war… which is why it makes absolutely NO SENSE why it would be okay for the students to murder each other and lessen their work force. It’s so dumb.

This book features the laziest world-building I’ve ever encountered. It’s wild.

Despite this being the most covetted quadrant, they waste space by conscripting the rebel kids (children of those part of some previous big rebellion I can’t remember) into it, who they supposedly do not trust, where they’ll be given access to dragons and magic? Make it make sense! Why not give them manual labor jobs if they can’t be trusted? Why give them positions that everyone else wants to have?

And yeah, despite everyone supposedly having trained for years to get into this quadrant, nobody seems to know anything about it! The students talk about dragons, dragon riders and the quadrant in ways that make them sound so unsure about everything. If you’re willing to risk your life to get in here, shouldn’t you have done reseach? Or, if this was such a popular quadrant, shouldn’t all of these things be common knowledge? A few examples:

“Plus, I’ve heard that riders are allowed to marry sooner than the other quadrants,” Dylan adds.

“True. Right after graduation.” If we survive. “I think it has something to do with wanting to continue bloodlines.” Most successful riders are legacies.

“I overhead a third-year say when a first-year survives Threshing unbonded, the quadrant lets them repeat the year and try again if they want.”

I study the map. The Esben Mountain Range is the highest along our eastern border with Braevick, making it the least likely place for an attack, especially since gryphons don’t tolerate altitude nearly as well as dragons, probably due to the fact that they’re half-lion, half-eagle and can’t handle the thinner air at altitudes.

The author also opts out of ever attempting to explain anything the dragons do. Whenever someone has a perfectly reasonable question about the dragons, the response is always just about “respecting one’s life” because if they try to ask, the dragons will kill them? (Again, why?) Anyway, this is just an excuse on the author’s part because she doesn’t want to think of a reasonable response. 🤷‍♀️

Here’s another pressing question I have with the dragons… why do they even need people in the first place? There was some crap about them needing their riders’ magic to power the wards but why do they care about the wards in the first place? Beats me. They are clearly powerful and independent creatures so I don’t know why they need people.

Let’s talk more about the Big Bad War College^TM and how the sudents didn’t learn jack shit from it.

Majority of this book takes place when the FMC (I can’t believe I haven’t even gotten to her yet) is finally in the college, so I expected to be learning about the world and the dragons and everything through the classes she was taking… Of course that didn’t happen.

There are only two prominent classes featured in the book, and one of them is called Battle Brief (😂😭), which was used as an excuse for the readers to have tidbits of what was going on in the real world while still giving us a university setting, and the one for dragon riding (I don’t remember what it was called), where nobody was really taught anything, and the students just flew around and the professors were like, fuck it figure it out yourselves. 🤨

Instead of taking meaningful classes, we have bullshit training for school events like Squad Battles and War Games (😂😭) that are all basically high school sports festivals but with murder and ZERO cameraderie—which again, doesn’t make sense because these people will be expected to work together towards one common purpose (which, I’m gonna be honest, I have no idea what that purpose is) and protect each other when they graduate. 💀

The Threshing, where the dragons chose students to bond with, was hilarious to me. The students walked around a giant forested area and were free to look at the dragons. It felt like free time at Jurrasic World. And again, some students, instead of trying to “impress” the dragons, went around trying to kill a small dragon, which is really dumb because how will the other dragons like them if they killed one of their own? No idea.

Okay, let’s finally talk characters.

We have to start with our heroine, Violet Sorrengail. You will never forget that she is THE heroine, because this book goes the extra mile to paint her as The One by presenting us with random factoids about her that don’t really add anything to her personality.

Obviously, she has two toned hair. Yeah, she’s super tiny. Of course, she’s the only not only bonds with one of the most powerful dragons available, but also bonds with another baby dragon with unique magic. She has a physical disability where her joints suddenly dislocate (which is not explicitly named in the book, but it’s depicted similarly to Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome). Normally, I would appreciate the disability rep, but there was never any nuanced conversation about it so it didn’t really seem to matter.

The only attempt at conversation with her disability was when she couldn’t mount or stay on her dragon, and I had so many notes this, because I have no idea why they didn’t just put saddles on all of the dragons in the first place, and instead just let all these kids adults die when they couldn’t stay on.

Violet also doesn’t have to study for tests because she’s super smart. 😗 This really annoyed me because the author used it as a funny attempt to “show” instead of tell with the world building—Violet would recite paragraphs and paragraphs worth of facts and history about the world to help her relax or concentrate, which was insane when she was trying to escape one of her classmates attempting to kill her while they were crossing the parapet. 😭

The book also makes it blatantly obvious which male character is going to be the love interest, because he’s given the longest description for a character to ever exist. Please witness this for yourself:

The third turns in my direction and my heart simply…stops.

He’s tall, with windblown black hair and dark brows. The line of his jaw is strong and covered by warm tawny skin and dark stubble, and when he folds his arms across his torso, the muscles in his chest and arms ripple, moving in a way that makes me swallow. And his eyes… His eyes are the shade of gold-flecked onyx. The contrast is startling, jaw-dropping even—everything about him is. His features are so harsh that they look carved, and yet they’re astonishingly perfect, like an artist worked a lifetime sculpting him, and at least a year of that was spent on his mouth.

He’s the most exquisite man I’ve ever seen.

And living in the war college means I’ve seen a lot of men.

Even the diagonal scar that bisects his left eyebrow and marks the top corner of his cheek only makes him hotter. Flaming hot. Scorching hot. Gets-you-into-trouble-and-you-like-it level of hot. Suddenly, I can’t remember exactly why Mira told me not to fuck around outside my year group.

Throwing this hilarious gem:

He’s using a dagger to peel an apple, removing the rind in one long curl, and the blade continues its path as his eyes lift, locking with mine.

My whole head tingles.

My note on this quote was simply: Edgy. 😭

Honestly, Xaden has no personality aside from this try-hard edginess, so I can’t even make fun of him properly. The rest of the characters are all equally bland and shallow. I could drop a few names of Violet’s classmates but none of them matter and I don’t care. But for the sake of it, here’s a snippet of a character being an absolute child:

Looking past him, I catch Jack Barlowe running a finger across his neck at me.

There is one queer character that is queer not for proper representation and is there just as a token queer character. She, along with every other student in this college, is just having sex during every free time they have. They are horny teens at their cores.

Superficial characters mixed in with the atrocious writing (phrases like “supreme badass” and “holy fucking hot” were thrown around) gave me the impression that this book was originally inteded to be YA. (For the record, this is probably not true, but this is how I felt.)

The romance plays a big role in the story, and it isn’t even what it’s advertised to be.

This was supposed to be an enemies-to-lovers romance, right? Well, everyone kept telling Violet that Xaden was out to get her, but NOT ONCE did he ever attempt to kill or even hurt her. There was no hate. It was all a lie.

There’s instant-attraction, which, fine, I am not particularly mad about, but oh my god, the writing made it unbearable to read about.

You are not attracted to toxic men, I remind myself, and yet, here I am, getting all attracted. I have been since the first second I saw him, if I feel like being honest.

The wind ruffles his hair, and I sigh at the completely unfair advantage he has over every man in this courtyard. He doesn’t even have to try to look sexy… he just is.

Because of my theory that the spice was added in last minute to make this book a surefire hit, I’m going to also throw it in as a last-minute bonus point. The sex scenes are hilarious and Rebecca Yarros makes it abundantly clear that she is a big fan of Sarah J. Maas. I can’t leave you guys on a cliffhanger and not show you exactly what I mean:

I love his loss of control just as much as I fear my own, and when I swirl my hips, he groans, arching his neck as he thrusts once. Twice.

On the third, he shouts, then shudders within me, and his power lashes out in streaks of shadows, the force splitting the wooden target on the other side of the window.

Pieces fly and Xaden throws out another wave of darkness that lasts just long enough to shield us from the debris. Then the shadows retreat and daggers clatter to the ground behind me.

He swallows my cry as my back bows, the first wave of my orgasm washing over me, releasing that tight coil of tension in a burst of sparks at the edge of my vision, breaking me into a million scattered stars. Lightning strikes outside my window, flashing light through the room again and again as he strokes me with an expertise that kicks the first climax into a second.

[…]

The armoire door groans, then splinters off the hinges, and Xaden’s shadows whip out, protecting me as the frame snaps and wood crashes around us. My power flares, rising in answer to his, sizzling beneath my skin as I grab ahold of his shoulders, my mouth finding his.

In conclusion…

I wasn’t expecting to love this book, but I had some hopes. I typically like to turn off my brain when I read, because I mostly read for fun vibes, but I couldn’t accept how lazily everything from the plot to the world-building to the characters were written. 😂 I’m happy for those who enjoyed it, but personally, I wish I could unread it. 😅

Let’s chat!

Have you read this book? Did you or did you not enjoy it? Do you have any (hopefully better) dragon book recommendations for me? 😂

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