Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I don't think I have ever felt so conflicted about a book after finishing it. I stopped using Tiktok sometime around six months ago, and I have been divorced from the Booktok community for a while now as a result. Because of this, I seem to have completely missed the insane hype train that has built around Fourth Wing. I was recommended this book by my friend, who knows how much of an avid fantasy-enjoyer I am. I went into the story mostly blind, only knowing that it was about dragon riders with special powers, all training together in a magic school. The pitch all seemed very Harry Potter, and the promise of dragons absolutely had me intrigued, so I jumped in, not knowing that behind the thin veneer of fantasy, this is very much a Romance Novel.
I want to start by saying that I have no problem with romance as a genre, but it is something that I personally have absolutely no interest in reading. I tend to be a pretty romance-averse personality myself, and I feel the same when reading about romance. If it is a small subplot to supplement the main story, then I can usually grit and bear it for the few scenes when it is forced to take center stage. But in Fourth Wing, where everything about the setting is dripping with death and war and high stakes and political intrigue and fighting tooth and nail to overcome impossible odds with the hope of barely surviving long enough to see graduation, EVERYTHING is sidelined the second the story's love interest enters any scene. It feels like, more than anything, all of the talk of war and possible death around every corner only serves as an outside force to build tension for what the reader is really supposed to care about, which is the Violet x Xaden fanfiction being canonized on page.
There are quite a few things that I really enjoyed about the book. For one, the dragons were just fantastic. I love the way they are written to be these massive, untouchable walls of scales and fire, with discerning minds unfathomable to humans, and who all live in a mysterious place called the Vale that no human has ever seen. They're these perfect creatures who are overflowing with power, and as someone who loves dragons with my entire heart, I loved to see them get the respect they deserve. I thought the powers riders shared with their dragons - referred to in the book as Signets - were really fascinating as well. I love when a story has elements that encourage you to make your own character to live in its world. When reading Fourth Wing, you can't help but imagine what your dragon would look like and what kind of cool power you would have, and it's all really fun.
I also loved seeing the creative ways that Violet had to overcome the challenges in front of her. I'm always a sucker for a good underdog protagonist, and this book certainly has one. Violet is written to be short and frail and more interested in books than physical activity. She is also written to have a physical disability - an unnamed condition that makes the ligaments of her joints more weak and prone to tears or sprains - that really made her stand out and presented her with unique challenges throughout the story. And for the most part, rather than having her train really hard and magically overcome those problems through sheer force of will, the book accepts that there are some things that Violet will never be able to really overcome, and it instead allows her to come up with some really interesting and out-of-the-box solutions to overcome those problems.
All that being said, I feel like every time I was really starting to fall into a rhythm and enjoy the book for its interesting fantasy world, Xaden would come on screen and it would all fall away as Violet's attention was pulled away from whatever she was doing and onto his carved jawline and gold-flecked eyes and the heat building in the pit of her stomach. And I can't stress that this happens all the time throughout the book. As someone who really doesn't enjoy romance, it was incredibly distracting to be pulled away from a cool fight or some interesting worldbuilding just to listen to Violet wax poetically again about how attractive Xaden is but how much she shouldn't be attracted to him actually because he wants to kill her. (I could mention that Xaden never actually poses a genuine threat to Violet's life in the book - it really feels like she just has to keep reminding the reader that he is supposed to want to kill her to try to convince us that this is an enemies-to-lovers story - but I digress.)
This book reads like blatant wish fulfillment. Admittedly, as a man who does not read romance or romantasy, please take my read with a grain-of-salt here, but Violet feels almost like a parody of a romantasy protagonist. She's petit and effortlessly gorgeous, with brown hair that turns silver at the end completely naturally. She reads books and has no interest in fighting, and she [SPOILERS] gets to bond with two dragons instead of one and gets cool powers to summon lightning and stop time. [END SPOILERS] And she pines after the "bad boy with a heart of gold", Xaden, who is tall and ripped and has a cool eye scar and has awesome edgy shadow powers.
But you know what? After all I've said about how much this book irritated me, I'm kind of here for it. If Geralt of Rivia - an effortlessly badass, loner protagonist with cool scars and silver hair, who wins every fight and has every woman he meets desperately fawning over him - can exist and be loved, why can't Violet? I think everyone deserves to have their fun wish-fulfillment book. And at the end of the day, I think that's the best way to read Fourth Wing. I came into it for all the wrong reasons, expecting a war/magic school fantasy novel without any preparation for the romance. But if you approach the book as what it is - a steamy romance novel that happens to be set in a war/magic school fantasy setting - then it suddenly turns into a really fun summer read. More than anything else I could possibly say about this book, Fourth Wing is fun. I don't think it's going to win any awards for its prose or worldbuilding or social commentary, but it's a fun read. I think that people who are more involved in the romantasy scene/genre are going to love this book (and evidently they very much do, with the way this book has seemed to take the internet by storm since its release.) I think if you are looking for a story that is heavier on the fantasy than romance, then I would advise looking elsewhere, because this book is not for us.
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