Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros – Review

Published: May 2, 2023

Publisher: Entangled – Red Tower Books

Series: The Empyrean #1

Genre: Fantasy

Pages: 512 (Hardcover)

My Rating: 5 Stars

Synopsis:
Enter the brutal and elite world of a war college for dragon riders from USA Today bestselling author Rebecca Yarros

Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders.

But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away…because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them.

With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter—like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant.

She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise.

Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom’s protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret.

Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda—because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die.

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I initially avoided this book because of the hype. I thought surely this could not possibly be as good as everyone says it is, but then I saw glowing reviews from a few of my favorite bloggers and caved! Those folks have fantastic recommendations, so I went and ordered a copy and once I started reading it I literally did not want to put it down. I was unproductive outside of reading for like, two days because this book was so good!

Violet Sorrengail is forced to join Basgiath War College as a Rider candidate despite her frailty and years of training to join the Scribes because her mother, General Lilith Sorrengail, intends all her children to become Riders. Fortunately Violet is clever and genuinely a good person, so she makes friends and avoids getting murdered by the unfortunate number of enemies she’s made. Rather than languishing through hundreds of pages of classes and no dragons, the story does time skips throughout the first year dropping in when anything important is happening. We see key moments in lectures, hands on training, personal/character development moments, and big things like Presentation, where the students are shown off to the dragons, and Threshing, where first year candidates are hopefully chosen by a dragon. I loved this choice because we get to spend enough time with the characters to get a good feel for them and begin to care for even the secondary characters, but the pace never slows down. It’s snappy and engaging, not giving even a single dull moment time to intrude. 

This time is also spent building the world these Rider hopefuls live in and unfortunately, it happens to be one of constant war. The dragon riders exist to defend Navarre from Poromiel’s gryphon fliers, who have been regularly attacking border towns. A rebellion by the Tyrrish several years prior really shook things up too, especially since the children of the rebels were forced into Rider candidacy and Violet’s mother is the one who executed them. Needless to say, there’s a great deal of politics going on behind the scenes though much of it doesn’t become truly important until later in the book.

And did I mention the characters? Violet is an extremely likable main character and I cannot express how much I appreciate that we are shown her cleverness and intelligence rather than being repeatedly told she’s the smartest girl in the room while she makes bad choices. Her friendly squadmates Rhiannon and Liam are quite likable and add to the story positively and are given a decent amount of depth and backstory. The real gems here are Xaden and Dain and while they both play on some common tropes – tall dark and handsome bad boy and rule following good boy – I couldn’t help but to love the character interactions! It’s also got a couple spicy scenes and some fantastic banter which I really appreciated – no awkward dialogue here! This has finally filled the SJMaas shaped hole in my heart but it’s even cooler because there’s a school setting and dragons! 

This is definitely going on my Best of the Year list and though I feel like I’ve been saying that a lot lately, that’s actually an amazing thing! It just means I’ve read some fantastic books this year! I tried to keep this spoiler free, but if anybody wants to chat about some spoilery stuff, feel free to leave a comment because I am so filled with excitement about this book that I could talk about it for hours. It’s a good thing the sequel, Iron Flame, will be coming out in November 2023 and I hope the following installments will follow a similarly snappy release schedule.