Antonia Bernardin

My 47th read of the year (and one I actually forgot to review somehow) was Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros. This book has been huge on Booktok, so, once again, let’s play the game of: does it live up to the hype?

You can read my review for book 2, Iron flame here

An attempt at summarising

Violet is small and breakable, she was trained to live the comfortable and safe life of a scribe until her mother (and commander of the army) declares otherwise. She will be sent to the ruthless rider’s quadrant of the Basgiath college, everyone is conscripted to join the college to become something but the riders are volunteer only. Dragons will only allow the fittest and strongest riders, all of the training in the riders quadrant is designed to weed out the weak and, even if you make it through training, the dragons may choose to incinerate you instead.

In short, Violet knows she’s being sent to her death but she decides that she is not going to die today. To her surprise, she keeps surviving. Despite finding herself up against the children of rebellious leaders, whom her mum killed in the war and forced their children to be conscripted into the riders quadrant. She is especially wary of Xaden, son of the rebellion leader and an excellent warrior/ rider. Circumstances end up throwing them together and Violet must contend with facing the fact that he may not be as bad as he seems and that their own government may have a lot of flaws.

My thoughts

I enjoyed this book SO MUCH. It has the same vibe as ACOTAR, something written purely for fantasy lovers, very readable, with nice broody enemies to lovers romance. I felt like the world building had a lot of depth and it was a different (but yet somehow similar) take on this kind of magic.

It’s got dragons, it’s got magic, it’s got a ruthless Divergent/ Hunger Games style school. It’s got morally grey characters, found family, ‘who did this to you’ trope.

I can understand some of the complaints on Tiktok about the writing style, sometimes the dialogue is a little unrealistic but this didn’t take away from the book at all and frankly, I wouldn’t have noticed it if it hadn’t been pointed out. If you can read some of the fairly ridiculous phrases in ACOTAR and still enjoy the books, you can 100% enjoy this book.

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