Fourth Wing Book Review

Don’t get me wrong, Fourth Wing is still crammed with the tropes we’ve come to expect from YA/Romantasy novels. There’s the brooding bad guy who can weild shadow magic who hates the main character for (actually pretty good) reasons. At first he’s just the hot bad guy she hates while wanting him, and then she comes to realise that there’s more brimming under that conventionally attractive surface. And if you think I’ve forgotten which book I’m talking about and I’ve gone into a discussion about Rhysand from ACOTAR instead of Xaden from Fourth Wing… well, I wouldn’t blame you.

It feels like there’s a decent enough plot pieced together around the romance though. Romantasy works best for me when the love is in the centre of the plot, but doesn’t eclipse everything, and I think Yarros did a good job of getting that delicate balance right here. I really liked the main character, Violet, because she feels realistic. She’s got clear flaws in her character, so she’s not just a pretty stand-in cardboard cut out for the reader, and I also liked that she has a disability which not only adds a whole bunch of tension to the plot (she sprains and breaks her bones really easily, which is a major issue when you’re in the middle of a school which values physical strength and encourages fighting and combat) but also means she has to figure out how to survive this environment with her disability- at the same time, I think the author does a fantastic job of not making her disability feel like a weakness or a huge part of her character, it doesn’t take over her whole character, it is just a part of who she is and what she has to deal with. Xaden is okay, I guess. Unlike a lot of romance leads in these types of books, he is at least respectful of Violet and her consent, even if he does the angry jealous guy who gets hotheaded from time to time thing. It’s certainly a lot healthier on paper than a lot of other romances out there. Xaden also isn’t a huge dick to other women, so he’s got that going for him, unlike a certain wing-spanned individual. Although the burning the world to the ground to keep your lover safe stuff does get a little old.

I also liked the side characters a lot. Imogen grew on me, and I liked Rhi, Ridoc, Liam and Sawyer a lot too. It was tense all the way through because, a bit like The Hunger Games, you just knew that there were too many characters that you cared about and the book wouldn’t let you hoard favourites like that. And, sure enough, it didn’t. The deaths throughout the book were a harsh reminder of the world Violet and her friends live in, and I think this was another well-executed part of the story. The dragons were also pretty cool- I don’t want to spoil too much because there’s a bit of a twist there, but I thought the world-building around them was pretty neat. It reminded me a lot of something like Eragon.

Now on to some of the less than stellar parts of the book. I’ll start by saying that, beyond the dragons, the world felt a little lacklustre. Maybe it was just me, but the descriptions of things like the big deadly obstacle course the students have to run through and the place they go to meet the dragons felt a bit… white-spacey to me. I don’t know, I just had a hard time picturing the settings, which pulled me out of the book a little bit. A bigger issue I had with the book though is that, while I really loved the first two thirds or so, the last few chapters felt incredibly predictable. It’s very very similar to other books in the genre, most notably From Blood and Ash which has a similar twist and matches the plot here almost beat for beat. While the very very final twist is less similar, it was also very easy to see coming. I’m not sure if it’s me, but I predicted the last few chapters about halfway through the book, and sure enough it played out exactly as I expected it to. Which was a bit disappointing and I hoped for a bit more. I’m curious to see what happens next in the story, and there are clearly some major issues Violet and Xaden need to work on, which I do think is a good thing and gives them a bit of nuance as a couple.

The book really surprised me, and I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to. The plot was good for the first two thirds or so of the book, and I liked the main cast of characters and the dragons, and I really loved Violet as the MC. However, some of the descriptions made it difficult for me to picture the settings, and I found the plot twists towards the end of the book to be very cliched and similar to other books I’ve read. I will definitely pick up book two and see what happens next though!