Book Report - Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

Originally Published: Sept. 19, 2023, 12:50 a.m. Last updated: Sept. 19, 2023, 12:50 a.m.

Tags: books

A fantasy story full of action and romance, Fourth Wing is the first book in what's likely to become a popular series. It starts a bit slow and miserable. It takes time for the characters to develop enough to be likeable, but once it hits its stride, it's a gripping read.

I had a bit of a hard time getting into this story. Violet, our main character, starts out incredibly annoying and frustrating. She's genuinely unlikeable, from her self-pity to her self-contradictory decisions. In her defense, she's still a teenager forcibly thrust into a situation she wasn't properly prepared for or wanted, but that doesn't make her any more pleasant to read about. This all reminds me of how miserable it was to follow Feyre's point of view in A Court of Thorns and Roses which was equally difficult to get into. Fourth Wing performs better than ACOTAR in that regard, as Feyre wasn't remotely tolerable until her second book.

There are character dynamics at play here that remind of both The Hunger Games and Divergent, and I wouldn't be surprised to find out Yarros was inspired by both. The building romance in this story is a bit hard to believe at times, as Violet and her chosen hot boy are just inexplicably drawn to each other, apparently from the get go, despite everything that's supposed to be in their way. If you tune out just how thirsty they are for a bit though, it's fun to read about them and the chemistry and sparks evoke pleasant emotions.

There are a handful of spicy scenes in the book. They're... not great. They're pretty typical examples of spice, and the characters behave exactly as you'd expect them to by that point in the book. I couldn't finish them and just glossed over for plot points.

The twists at the end are fun to experience. There's proper hints and buildup to them and the payoff is pretty good. I had a hard time caring too much about the stakes and consequences at play in the final conflict though because I didn't feel like Yarros ever had a good grasp on things like head counts and we'd become pretty desensitized to death by that point. There's an argument to be made that the desensitization was purposeful from Yarros, but it still made it hard to care about people dying.

We end with a blantant but reasonably done setup for the next books.

All in all, I'd recommend the book to anyone who's into romantasy stories of this type, I just don't think it deserved quite all the hype I'd been hearing about it.