CBR Square- Borrowed
Rebecca Yarros is about to reinvent the fantasy genre with Fourth Wing! It has sexy times in it, and no fantasy novel in recent times has people enjoying each other’s company!
Sigh. I borrowed this for my audible subscription. It was fine. There were actually some things that I liked about this book. I liked the main character Violet has strengths and weaknesses. She has to use her brain to get herself out of situations where other people just use brute strength. Some of the characters are not straight and that does not seem to be a big deal. THERE IS A GOLD BABY DRAGON. Okay, I love her. Not enough to continue the series, but I do love her.
Here are a few of the problems I had with this book: the worldbuilding stinks. Apparently someone training to be a scribe before she gets to ride on dragons and fight using them knows nothing about what is really going on in the world. Which leads me to the next problem, the character thinks and “squees” like she is a 13 year old girl. If your main character is supposed to be a very smart adult, then write her that way. If she has to keep saying she’s an adult, you are doing it wrong.
Let’s say that your country is under threat. You have a fighting school where you train soldiers. Why would you allow someone who is mentally unfit and just wants to kill people to train there? That person won’t make a good soldier. I will note here that I 100% do not subscribe to the school of toughening people up mentally, I THINK THAT IS BS. That probably makes me predisposed to dislike a military school on general principal.
I don’t mind an unlikable character. I don’t mind a flawed character that makes mistakes. But Xaiden? Is hot. That’s it. I got that, because it is repeated 50,000 times in the book. When I got done with the torture of the chapter from his point of view “Violet is so hot, grunt grunt,” and they said there were two more chapters from his point of view, I noped out so fast I am pretty sure I threw the phone away from me.
Now look, every few years someone’s book gets so hypes you’d think they reinvented the genre. It happens in fantasy, it happens in romance, I am sure it happens in other genres I read less of. Sometimes I pick them up out of curiosity, and sometimes I stay far away. Overall, I didn’t hate this. I think that’s about the best I can do.