Iron Flame (Prelude)
Welcome back, everyone. I hope that everyone enjoyed their January, because it’s time to get our hands dirty again. Today, we begin our grim quest through the literary hellscape that is Iron Flame, the second book in Rebecca Yarros’s Epic Fantasy series, The Empyrean.
I would tell you that I went into Iron Flame with an open mind, but that would be dishonest. I was strong biased in favor of this book.
Having seen Rebecca Yarros’s limited experience with Epic Fantasy firsthand in Fourth Wing, I was under no delusion that Iron Flame would be good. The books released so close together that she had no time to edit Iron Flame in response to feedback, let alone to grow and learn as a writer. What’s more, the very premise of Iron Flame clashes so horrendously with the end of Fourth Wing that only the most terrible of writing shortcuts could enable this sequel to occur.
Nevertheless, I came into this book wanting to find some excuse, ANY excuse, to rate it higher than its predecessor. I do not want to be one of those reviewers who gives each book a progressively lower rating for dramatic effect. What’s more, for as terrible as Fourth Wing was, I still came out of it convinced that Yarros is a good writer. I had hope that her books would at least improve slightly as she found her stride.
Iron Flame is so bad that, despite my bias, I have no choice but to rate it lower than Fourth Wing. It is so bad that I feel my credibility has been marred by ever claiming that Yarros is a good writer. It is so bad that it damages Fourth Wing by association, to the point that I should probably go back and lower that book’s rating.
But you don’t come here merely for me to say, “This book is bad.” You’re here so that we can discuss why it is bad. And, for better or worse, Iron Flame offers no shortage of lessons. It repeats many of the follies of Fourth Wing, but it also introduces entirely new problems. Over the next several months, we are going to explore those problems and hopefully learn how we can avoid making the same mistakes ourselves.
Unlike with Fourth Wing, this will not be a case of problems evolving and developing naturally over time. Rather, Iron Flame suffers from having new problems explode out of the text every few chapters, as if Yarros is constantly trying to outdo herself in how badly she can damage this series. There will be a rich variety of topics to discuss.
Buckle yourselves into your Special Snowflake dragon saddles. It’s showtime.
STATS
Title: Iron Flame
Series: The Empyrean (Book 2)
Author(s): Rebecca Yarros
Genre: Fantasy (Epic)
First Printing: November 2023
Publisher: Red Tower Books
SPOILER WARNING
Much like with Fourth Wing, we will be going through Iron Flame in chronological chunks. This will entail heavy spoilers or the entire book, but you will have control over just how much is spoiled for you and when.
Each part will be clearly marked with the chapters that it covers. I will confine the analyses within each part to the content of those chapters (and any chapters previously covered).
If it becomes necessary to bring attention to something that happens later in the book, the spoilers will kept mild.
If heavy spoilers from later in the book absolutely must be brought up, they will be isolated in a subsection marked with the “Heavy Spoilers” label.
If you do care about spoilers, you can bail out as soon as you decide that you don't want to read any further ahead (so to speak). I will be sure to conclude each part by specifying which chapters will be covered in the next part, allowing you to plan ahead.
Furthermore, there is the matter of Fourth Wing. As a sequel, it would not be practical to do a deep-dive analysis of Iron Flame without sharing spoilers for the previous entry. Heavy spoilers for the entirely Fourth Wing shall therefore be spread throughout this series (including this prelude), and they shall not be marked.
LEGACY OF FOURTH WING
I would prefer not to reiterate the issues of Fourth Wing in depth for this review.
I don’t think we’ll improve as writers if I simply point out recurring examples of things Yarros already messed up in that previous book. It would be more beneficial to focus on new lessons and only revive the old if some new facet or compelling example is presented to us.
I don’t want to bloat this review by recycling overdone points.
Some of the problems that were prevalent in Fourth Wing go dormant in this book. They aren’t corrected - at least one issue resurfaces when Yarros tries to review conflicts from Fourth Wing - but they don’t exist in any form that we can really learn from.
If an issue that was in Fourth Wing is further developed - whether it gets worse, expands laterally, or somehow improves - I will bring up said issue. Otherwise, assume that any and all problems from Fourth Wing continue onward through this book. I am also going to assume that you have already read the Fourth Wing reviews series. If not, you can find its archive here.
On a related note, I have decided not to recap Fourth Wing as part of this Prelude. I started working on it, only to realize that the amount of detail needed to cover everything that might be relevant to a review of Iron Flame would require a whole part unto itself. Additionally, a brief overview is more or less covered by the Premise section of this prelude (below). As an alternative to a recap, I will be referring back to Fourth Wing and providing context as necessary to support elements of this review.
RATING: 1/10
The only reason I do not rate this book lower is that I feel like anything less than a 1.0 rating is entering the territory of being illegible. Iron Flame is not Andrea Hairston’s Master of Poisons, a book so allergic to basic paragraph structure that I got a splitting headache after three chapters and had to stop reading for the sake of my own health. Any human adult who is functionally literate in the English language will be able to read Iron Flame.
Sadly, unless you are swept away in Yarros’s power fantasy, you will likely wish that Iron Flame was as illegible as Master of Poisons.
The Burden of the Sequel
Were Iron Flame a standalone fantasy novel, or perhaps the first book in a series, I would probably have rated it the same as Fourth Wing. Its flaws, taken in isolation, are not that much worse. This really shouldn’t be a huge surprise, given that Yarros would have completed the editing process for Iron Flame before the release of Fourth Wing. Comparable quality is to be expected.
However … Iron Flame is not a standalone or the start of the series It is a sequel. It is beholden to that which came before. It must use the prior entry as a foundation.
If something in Iron Flame is incongruous with Fourth Wing, and that incongruity cannot be explained within the bounds of the text, then that incongruity, in and of itself, is an objective flaw. If something in Iron Flame retroactively damages Fourth Wing, that is an objective flaw. If Yarros choose to ignore consequences of elements set up in Fourth Wing, or if she rushes the introduction of elements that she made up for Iron Flame but which should have been introduced in Fourth Wing … yet more objective flaws.
And, oh boy, does Yarros mess this up. I’m not even talking minor contradictions of lore or retcons ("retroactive continuity", or information added to a newer work to change a previous work) of small details within specific scenes. Fundamental lore and character elements are retconned from the very beginning of the book. Within just the first few chapters, it is blatantly clear that Yarros wrote herself into multiple corners and could not escape without gaslighting the audience. She could not even execute the premise of this book without aggressively undoing key beats from Fourth Wing.
One Ray of Sunshine
Iron Flame is not wholly devoid of merit. There are specks of gold amidst the dross. However, there is only one aspect where I can say that it truly improves over Fourth Wing. Were this text not an utter failure as a sequel, perhaps this one detail would have been enough to elevate this book to a higher rating than the first.
You may recall that one of my chief grievances with Fourth Wing was the lack of a coherent narrative between Threshing (about a third of the way into the book) and the climax. Easily half of the book’s overall length is filler, with Yarros introducing random plot threads and then discarding them within a couple of chapters, only to introduce something new a few chapters later and repeat the process. There’s no real sense of progression or cause and effect.
Iron Flame does have cause and effect. Nearly every scene and plot beat, no matter how flawed, extraneous, or nonsensical, can at least be traced back to something that happened either earlier in the book or back in Fourth Wing. To use the terminology of that famous lecture given by the writers of South Park, Fourth Wing was heavily burdened with “this happened, and then this happened”, while Iron Flame successfully graduates to “this happened, therefore this happened”.
PREMISE
I covered the premise of Iron Flame back in the Final Retrospective for Fourth Wing. That was from the perspective of someone who had just finished Fourth Wing and was trying to make sense of the marketing for the next book. This time, I’d like to share my thoughts after reading Iron Flame.
Overview
Barnes & Noble once again delivers.
“The first year is when some of us lose our lives. The second year is when the rest of us lose our humanity.” —Xaden Riorson
Everyone expected Violet Sorrengail to die during her first year at Basgiath War College—Violet included. But Threshing was only the first impossible test meant to weed out the weak-willed, the unworthy, and the unlucky.
Now the real training begins, and Violet’s already wondering how she’ll get through. It’s not just that it’s grueling and maliciously brutal, or even that it’s designed to stretch the riders’ capacity for pain beyond endurance. It’s the new vice commandant, who’s made it his personal mission to teach Violet exactly how powerless she is–unless she betrays the man she loves.
Although Violet’s body might be weaker and frailer than everyone else’s, she still has her wits—and a will of iron. And leadership is forgetting the most important lesson Basgiath has taught her: Dragon riders make their own rules.
But a determination to survive won’t be enough this year.
Because Violet knows the real secret hidden for centuries at Basgiath War College—and nothing, not even dragon fire, may be enough to save them in the end.
Reflection
This is one of those marketing blurbs that is entirely about vibe and has little to do with the actual text.
What’s presented here isn’t factually wrong (save for the “Dragon riders make their own rules” nonsense, but I’ll double back to that when it resurfaces in the text). These elements do exist in the book. It’s just that this is overexaggerating the Magical School angle, which is little more than set dressing, and it ignores the existential threat and revolution elements that actually drive the narrative.
It also only really applies to Part One of this book.
DOUBLE FEATURE
This book is split into a Part One and a Part Two. The split is almost at the exact center of the book. Each part tells its own narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. Furthermore, the story of Part Two is almost completely divorced from the premise described above.
This book is 745 pages (in the e-book version, at least). You can really feel the weight of that length as you read it. There is just too much stuff crammed into it. While trimming the fat would have been the best option, another viable solution would have been the split the two parts into separate books. This would make it easier to edit, by spreading out the work load, and given Yarros room to better flesh out each part so that there would be a proper framework to support the weight of each half.
What baffles me even more is that it seems like this would be the best choice from a marketing angle. Red Tower Books wanted to badly to create a wave of hype by slamming Iron Flame into stores just six months after Fourth Wing … only to then make audiences wait another 13 months for the third book (which is reportedly due out December 2024). Why not split this book into two and space out the releases, thereby keeping the flow of content steady and allowing them to charge for two books instead of just one? And that’s without getting into optimizing the profit in terms of the cost of printing a long book versus the amount that can reasonably be charged for it. I’m sure that someone with more expertise in marketing and publishing could explain this in a way that makes financial sense, but as a layman, this seems like a bizarre waste.
CONTENT WARNING
Unlike the previous entry, Iron Flame (at least, the e-book version of it) does not have a content warning in the book. Instead, the book has a page with a message from Entangled Publishing, assuring us that they want their readers to be well-informed, and a link to a profile for the book on the company’s web site. There, we find a link to a content warning … which, as January 30th, reads, “No content warning available for this book.” Given the reports I’ve hear about misprints and overall low-quality of the hard copies of Iron Flame, I am not shocked by this oversight.
Thankfully, I will not be so difficult to pry information from.
Violence
Much like Fourth Wing, Iron Flame features violence (and, by extension, blood) in abundance … written in a way that neuters it of any impact. Yarros tries to use things like death and pain to wring emotion from the audience, but the effort in these cases is so transparent that it comes off as laughable. If you have read much Epic Fantasy (even just at the YA level) or made it through the previous book, the violence will not affect you.
Torture (Heavy Spoilers)
This book includes two sequences of torture. The first one, in Chapter 23, is so limp that, on a first read, I began to question all the claims Yarros (via her self-insert Mary Sue) has made about being able to withstand pain. A few people each getting punched twice in the face, when said people are supposedly experienced martial artists, does not begin to approach torture. The second sequence, in Chapter 35, is another matter.
In this second torture sequence, Violet endures multiple days of being beaten to near-death and then magically healed. Yarros only gives us a glimpse of these beatings, presenting most of the torture through Violet reflecting upon her injuries. We also see Violet suffer a mental break and begin hallucinating that Liam (whom, you may recall, died in the last book) was standing beside her both during the torture and during periods of recovery.
I still do not think Yarros has much concept of what torture entails. This entire sequence is very clearly written from the perspective of someone who either only understands, or only wants to write about, the vague concept of torture. With that being said, when one considers the overall voice and tone of the book, coupled with the nature of Yarros’s established audience, I think that this approach of skirting around the dirty details makes sense. It’s a functional, stylistic choice.
Bringing it back to the content warning: if you cannot stomach any amount of torture in your books, then consider yourself warned about the chapters mentioned above. However, if this is not inherently a trigger for you, I think you will find it tolerable, especially if you can handle the aforementioned level of violence.
Swearing
This book is saturated in cursing and obscenities. Much like Fourth Wing, this does not make it feel gritty or mature. Imagine a preadolescent child who tries to prove that she is a rebel by projectile vomiting slurs that she learned from the movies her mom told her not to watch.
Pornography
Iron Flame features three scenes of graphic pornography, positioned in Chapters 27, 37, and 48. There is also a scene of interrupted foreplay in Chapter 60. Multiple lines of dialogue and narrative throughout the text refer to additional sexual acts performed off-screen, including charming and eloquent lines about how parts of Violet’s body are sore or swollen.
Yarros is the most disgusting author I have ever read in traditional publishing. Plenty of the works we’ve reviewed here had scenes that were clearly typed out with one hand. However, at least those other authors didn’t make me feel like I was reading a detailed personal sex diary. That’s before one considers that, with Violet being Yarros’s self-insert Mary Sue and so many other aspects of her life being reflected in the text, that this pornographic scenes might literally be tellings of Yarros’s sex life. It is very uncomfortable to read.
Ms. Yarros, if ever you hear people dismiss the Romance genre as pornography, I sincerely hope that you take a moment to reflect on the fact that YOU are part of the problem.
DEDICATION
Normally, I don’t think the dedication of a book is worth commenting upon. It is wholly outside of the story. The author is addressing people directly instead of letting the narrator do it. However, given that Violet is a self-insert Mary Sue, I think that a glimpse into Yarros’s unfiltered perspective is rather telling. The dedication for Iron Flame is as follows:
To my fellow zebras. Not all strength in physical.
This confirms that Yarros does not seem to realize that Violet is a delusional, abusive narcissist who cheats her way through challenges, gaslights anyone who calls out her flaws, survives due to unearned boons and the negation of consequences that anyone else would need to suffer, and ultimately succeeds only by the intervention of other people. She really does mean for Violet to be a paragon of moral, intellectual, and emotional strength. This tracks with the power fantasy that was identified in Fourth Wing (and continues in this book). Yarros wrote this story with the goal of providing Violet with endless validation, including the idea that she is strong. The context, which is what damns Violet, did not actually matter.
FRAMING
The books of The Empyrean are framed as an in-world account that has been translated into English. Both books feature this page right before the narrative proper begins.
The following text has been faithfully transcribed from Navarrian into the modern language by Jesinia Neilwart, Curator of the Scribe Quadrant at Basgiath War College. All events are true, and names have been preserved to honor the courage of those fallen. May their souls be commended to Malek.
This is not a bad narrative device at a conceptual level. Tolkien himself used it. It explains the use of modern-day English days and months, obscenities, and slang. When I read Fourth Wing, I saw this, thought, “That’s neat,” and kept reading.
However, upon cracking open Iron Flame and reading this again, alarm bells went off.
Our transcriber, Jesinia Neilwart? She’s in these books. She is the Token Disabled (Deaf) character who works in the Archives. She is Violet’s age.
Why, then, is the Navarrian language used by our POV characters not the “modern language”? The reason that the translator excuse worked for Tolkien was that he claimed to be translating an Old English transcription of Elvish lore into 20th Century English. He’s didn’t claim that Ælfwine of England wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in 20th Century English while living in the 11th Century. Are we meant to take this as foreshadowing that Jesinia is going to transcribe these accounts and then translate them centuries or millennia later with the help of immortality, time travel, or being raised from the dead?
Also, if the names have not been changed, then why are all the character names already in the “modern language”? As touched upon in the previous book, nearly every character has a name taken from Western European cultures. They’re also fairly modern versions of those names. Wouldn’t the names change with the language? Shouldn’t names that aren’t translated be in the original language? Tolkien himself accounted for this. For example, Meriadoc “Merry” Brandybuck was named “Kalimac” in Tolkien’s “source material”. “Kalimac” was nicknamed “Kali”, which means “merry”. Tolkien therefore “changed” the name of the character to something that could conceivably use “Merry” as a nickname.
If this is an account that Jesinia transcribed, why is it written in Present tense? The fact it is 1st Person makes sense - Jesinia would have been able to interview both Violet and Xaden directly - but surely Violet and Xaden would describe their experiences in Past tense (the way most of us do when telling a story from our pasts). What purpose would a scholar trying to preserve events for posterity have for putting the work into Present tense, anyway?
Then there’s the … awkward fact … that Yarros had a get-out-of-jail card here. She could have explained so many flaws in the worldbuilding and character writing by claiming the narrator was flawed and biased. Granted, this would not salvage the terrible writing, but it would at least provide a coherent explanation for the flaws that would have helped to preserve immersion. Instead, she establishes that this account is coming from a well-educated character who has a good relationship with Violet (and likely Xaden, by extension). This means that the flaws in the worldbuilding cannot be excused by ignorance of how the world works. It also means that the version of Violet we are presented with has probably already been polished to soften her edges (so she’s probably even more deplorable “in person”, so to speak).
I think that this translator’s note, and the problems it causes, are indicative of the problems with this series as a whole. Yarros starts off with fine concepts. However, as she adds on details, as she throws in elements that had been done well in other fantasy stories, she creates problems for herself. Consider how all of the issues I just rattled off would have been erased if she had restrained herself and reduced the translator’s note to something like this:
The following text has been transcribed by Jesinia Neilwart, Curator of the Scribe Quadrant at Basgiath War College. May the souls of the fallen be commended to Malek.
THE PLUNGE
With the paperwork dealt with, it’s time to dive right into the review proper.
The first part will cover just Chapters 1 and 2. Much like with Fourth Wing. I think that Iron Flame starts on a good note. There’s no shortage of problems for us to cover, yet at the same time, Yarros made some calls that I feel were not incorrect for starting a sequel. These chapters are a glimmer of hope before the book begins to ritualistically disembowel itself.
The journey starts tomorrow. I hope to see you all then. Have a good evening.
