Fourth Wing (Chapter 1)
STATS
Title: Fourth Wing
Series: The Empyrean (Book 1)
Author(s): Rebecca Yarros
Genre: Fantasy (Epic)
First Printing: 2023
Publisher: Red Tower Books
Rating: 2/10
SPOILER WARNING
Heavy spoilers will be provided for the entire story up through the end of the content covered in this part. Mild spoilers for elements later in the story may be provided, but I will keep the first paragraph of each section as spoiler-free as possible. Heavy spoilers from later in the book will be confined to clearly labelled sections.
STORY
We are introduced to Violet Sorrengail, the protagonist and 1st-person POV, on the day that she is conscripted as a dragon rider. In the opening scene, she is summoned to meet with her mother, the general in charge of Basgiath War College. We are introduced to the characters of Violet, her mother, and Violet's older sister Mira, who is already a rider. This scene makes it very clear that Violet is “fragile”, suffering from weak joints and generally poor physical health, and that her mother would rather she be killed in rider training than have one of her children be a scribe (which is what Violet's father was and what Violet was training to be previously). We also learn that Violet's father died of heart failure and that her older brother, Brennan, was a rider who died trying to quell a revolution.
We then get a scene where Mira helps Violet to pack for the Riders Quadrant (the dragon rider training school within the war college). We learn of Violet's bookish nature and of the cutthroat nature of the Quadrant. Mira gifts Violet with gear to help her survive the Quadrant: custom-made riding boots and body armor made from the scales of Mira's dragon.
Violet and Mira then travel to the entrance of the war college. This being the national day when conscripts are received, there is a massive crowd. Mira signs Violet in and sends her off to first test that all rider candidates must face, the Parapet: a balance beam that is hundreds of feet long and 200 feet above the ground, designed to make uncoordinated candidates fall to their deaths. (I should note that the Parapet is not treated as a proper noun in the first few chapters, yet it suddenly becomes one from Chapter 4 onward, despite the context of its usage not changing.) Mira's last words of advice are for Violet to find Dain Aetos, a childhood friend who is a 2nd-year Quadrant trainee, and to avoid Xaden Riorson, a 3rd-year trainee and the son of the man whose led the aforementioned revolution.
Violet then parts from Mira and scales the long staircase up to the Parapet. On the climb, she meets Rhiannon, who will serve as her best friend throughout the book, and Dylan, who is absolutely not going to die (he promised his girlfriend that he'd propose after graduating from the war college). Violet has her first encounter with Xaden at the entry to the Parapet. Dylan then steps out on the Parapet and immediately falls to his death.
NARRATIVE VOICE
We haven't talked about narrative voice in previous reviews. This is because, outside of the suffocating sexual tension in Notorious Sorcerer, the narrative voice hasn't had an overwhelming impact of the reading experience of these books. Each book did have its own voice, but I didn't feel it was worth factoring into the analysis (outside of, again, the Notorious Sorcerer review).
For those unfamiliar with the concept, narrative voice is exactly what it says on the tin: the voice of the narrator, as expressed through the prose. It is a combination of word choices, narrative descriptions, grammatical structure, paragraph length, information included or omitted, and various other details that come together to give an added layer of identity to the story. This contributes to the framing. Consider how much of Tolkien's work for Middle Earth reads like a translation of some ancient epic (which, if you didn’t know already, is the canonical, in-world explanation for how all of those books exist). When the narrator is a character within the story - such as in the case of a 1st-person POV - this characterization goes even deeper, as the story is very openly the version of events that this character would give. We end up learning a lot about the character telling the story through their voice in the prose.
I explain all of this because, based upon just the voice used in this first chapter, I immediately knew that this book would potentially be a very rough ride.
Modern Girl
Violet does not come across as a native of a fantastical world, shaped by the culture, traditions, magic, and technology of the time and place in which she lives. She reads like a 20-year-old woman in modern America - or, rather, what a 40-year-old woman in modern America thinks a 20-year-old woman in modern America thinks like. This comes across in her attitude towards sex (lamenting that her body count is only two at the start of the book), her unquestioning acceptance of modern American social norms, and her attitude towards her disability (something we will come back to later in this review series).
In isolation, I don't think that this is a problem. There are many ways that a fantastical setting could craft someone whose mindset is identical towards someone from our real world. The issue here is that this voice actively clashes with this story and the setting.
For a particularly easy example, Yarros really wanted to push the idea that the trainees in the Riders Quadrant pursue hedonistic sex due to the looming spectre of death, yet the voice of this opening chapter establishes that this society is already multiple generations past its version of a sexual revolution. I think she was trying to copy Pern here, but the thing is, Pern drew a clear line between sexual attitudes inside and outside of the Wyrs. You could tell who'd been raised in the Wyrs versus being born outside and recruited based solely on their attitudes towards sex.
Then there is the swearing. Fantasy is no stranger to foul language. Often, writers will craft obscenities that are unique to the setting (like “Mudblood”) to help flesh out the world, but this is not necessary. Real-world obscenities can be employed to give a more gritty feel to the world. Here, the swearing comes across as a juvenile attempt of a real-world American writer to copy A Song of Ice and Fire. The word “fuck” (and its variations) are used six times in Chapter 1. One or even two of these examples might have been fine, but their combined weight chips away at the experience.
A good example of both problems is the introduction of Xaden Riorson, which includes this charming little paragraph.
Even the diagonal scar that bisects his left eyebrow and marks the top corner of his cheek only makes him hotter. Flaming hot. Scorching hot. Gets-you-into-trouble-and-you-like-it level of hot. Suddenly, I can’t remember exactly why Mira told me not to fuck around outside my year group.
Does this sound like a character from a fantastical world who is enrolling in a military school to become a rider of dragons, or does it sound like a Millennial trying to imitate a Gen Z TikToker?
All this is to say that the voice actively hampers immersion. I don't feel like this story is being told by a character in the world, which is a problem when the story is literally being told by a character in the world. If this is your first-ever Fantasy book (such as if, say, you were an avid reader of Yarros's Romance work and decided to follow her into this genre), this might not bother you. For all of the Epic Fantasy readers this book was directly marketed to, though, it could outright break the experience for you.
Point of Sue
This is technically a character point, but since the narrative voice is what tipped me off to this on the first place, I'll get it out of the way now: Violet is Yarros's self-insert Mary Sue.
By the end of this chapter, I immediately knew that Violet would be the focal point of the Protagonist-Centered Morality, that she would be handed immense power without earning it, and that she would be a Special Snowflake who got all of the super cool and awesome things. I figured all of this out based purely upon the voice. (Later chapters would prove this conclusion to be correct on all counts.)
There were a few points that gave this away, such as efforts to make Violet seem clever and relatable and how she is gifted with a suit of literal plot armor, but the detail that really hammered this home was the handling of Violet's disability. More specifically, one of the symptoms of her disability to twisted to make her a Special Snowflake.
Violet is heavily implied to have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (something that even I picked up on while reading it, despite having only a passing familiarity with the condition). This is, rather conveniently, the same condition that Yarros herself is reported to have. Violet’s symptoms certainly align quite well to EDS when I double-checked them online. (Regardless of Yarros's actual condition or whatever fantastical condition Violet has, I will refer to Violet's condition as “EDS” for the purposes of this review.)
One of the symptoms of EDS, on top of the over-elastic joints and the ease at which one bruises, is prematurely graying hair. Violet's hair, though? It is frosted with silver.
Not once, in the entire book, is the word “gray” uses on conjunction with her hair. It is always “silver”. This could have been a fun characterization detail, with Violet putting a positive spin on her condition, except the dialogue of multiple other characters confirms the color is silver. Two of these characters even refer to it as silver while actively trying to insult her, implying that the color is so undeniable that it can’t even be called gray to mock it. What's more, Yarros goes out of her way to call attention to this trait, with Violet not wanting to cut her hair because it is the only healthy part of her body, despite the fact that the color change indicates the exact opposite.
So, yeah. Yarros tried to have her cake and eat it, too. She twisted a symptom of a real-world disorder into a marker of Special Snowflake status (one associated with divinity, incidentally, as Savage Books recently covered), while simultaneously exploiting that same disorder to make the character more sympathetic. Couple that with the fact that the disorder never actually impacts the plot, this was clearly a setup for a Sue.
(And, yes, Violet having EDS, or whatever disorder this is supposed to be, has no relevance to the story outside of establishing herself as Yarros's self-insert. It surfaces here and in a couple of early scenes to try to drive up the stakes and tension, but ultimately, it fades into the background, despite the fact that Violet is being subjected to conditions that should be ripping her body apart. Even Sun Spider, a modern-day Marvel Comics character, suffers more from her EDS than Violet does, despite the fact that Sun-Spider has all of Peter Parker's powers to help her avoid injuries and heal rapidly when she does get hurt. If anything, the fact that Violet is small in stature impairs her far more than her disability.)
In the Present
In addition to being in 1st-person POV, this book is written in the present tense. I haven’t read many works that use a present-tense POV, but it has been explained to me that this technique help action stories to feel more lively. It lends events a sense of frantic energy, at least when the action starts. (The flip side of this is that it can make a writer come across as an amateur who’s taking shortcuts.)
I’m not certain whether Fourth Wing benefits much from the use of present-tense POV, but I also don’t think that it hurts the experience. This is, at least in concept, the right type of story for it.
Why It Matters
Voice is not the deciding factor in whether or not a book is objectively well-written. It has greater impact on the subjective experience of the reader. However, that is not to say that is has no impact on objective quality.
By establishing the Violet was a modern-day Mary Sue living in an Epic Fantasy novel, Yarros inadvertently telegraphed key plot beats. A lot of the running commentary I made on the Shadiversity Discord came from the fact that I knew the broad strokes of what Yarros would do with this story. The only genuine surprises were when I underestimated just how far Yarros would go to service the power fantasy. Furthermore, because Yarros didn't consider the ripple effects of introducing certain worldbuilding elements, the effort to maintain Violet as the moral axis of the story instead ended up twisting her into an incredibly unlikeable protagonist for any reader who wasn't here to ride the power fantasy high. Given that this book was not advertised as a power fantasy, this constitutes an objective flaw.
CHARACTER
Violet Sorrengail
This chapter was a strong introduction for Violet. She was established as a sympathetic character with relatable, personal conflicts in the midst of this fantastical world.
I realize how contradictory that sounds, given the whole section on narrative voice, but the thing about Mary Sues or out-of-place characterization is that they don't necessarily kill a story at the outset. People don't rag on Kirito from Sword Art Online because of his conduct prior to Akihito Kayaba announcing the death game: they rag on him because he continues to be a bland piece of cardboard while achieving more and more ridiculous feats and building an ever-larger harem. Likewise, Violet having a Sue appearance or thinking like a middle-aged woman's concept of a college girl heading into spring break don't ruin her character at this stage. They are just a baseline for her identity. They could even serve as opportunities for her to grow.
This chapter effectively conveys the impact of Violet's condition on her health, the dynamics of her surviving family and how the lost family members have affected her, and what her attitudes are about the world in which she lives. Thanks to the last-minute advice and help that Mira gives her, we learn about flaws (or, at least, less advantageous traits) that could compromise her ability to survive in the college, thereby defining limits for her character. In short, we learn who Violet is and why she feels the way she does about things. This is great stuff.
And - minor spoilers for what's ahead - this chapter serves as the starting point for (what could have been) a fantastic character arc. Violet's story is about learning to find her place in an environment that should destroy her and about overcoming the doubts of both others and herself. The disability itself may be wasted, but the general idea that she is at a severe physical disadvantage is successfully established in this chapter, and that concept carries forward throughout the first half of the book. Violet will need to use her mind to survive, not unlike the heroine of Disney's animated Mulan film.
Granted, the arc will ultimately buckle under the bloated mess that this book becomes, yet this is still a strong start, and the quality of that arc will remain visible even beneath the character assassination, messy plot, and poorly-considered worldbuilding we'll see down the line.
Xaden Riorson
Five years prior to the start of the story, Xaden's father tried to lead the succession of the province of Tyrrendor from the kingdom of Navarre (the main setting of this book). The leaders of the rebellion were executed, but the children of those leaders were all conscripted into the dragon riders. This is acknowledged in-universe as both a sadistic punishment (given the high mortality rate of the rider trainees, no one else is conscripted into the riders) and a test of character (since the dragons won't partner with a rider who is a threat to Navarre). Xaden has a personal motivation to kill Violet as an act of revenge, since her mother had a pivotal role in his father's execution.
He is also the Bad Boy Love Interest.
This is not a spoiler. His entire introduction screams, “VIOLET WILL HAVE SEX WITH THIS MAN.” This is immediately apparent as soon as one reads that paragraph that we covered while discussing the narrative voice.
I want to reiterate that this formulaic setup is not inherently a bad thing. If this were a Romance first, I would accept it as part of the story progression and roll with it. I would have done the same if it was Young Adult. As something that was marketed as Epic Fantasy for adults, though, I did find this mildly frustrating. I could tell, from the physical description alone, that Xaden would never truly pose a threat to Violet's well-being. Any scenes that are supposed to be threatening are laid bare as sexual fantasies.
Rhiannon Matthias
Rhiannon is the designated Best Friend character for this book. She and Violet bond when Violet swaps a single boot with her prior to crossing the Parapet. Violet compromises her own ability to survive so that Rhiannon can have the use of one of her custom rider boots, and that act of kindness cements the bond between them.
This was a very strong character moment for Violet. The friendship that forms between the pair as a result of this moment is very believable. It's just that … well …
Rhiannon is narratively pointless.
The fact that Rhiannon is Violet's best friend isn't going to have any impact on the story. She is just an accessory so that Violet can have a female best friend. She also serves as homosexual representation, showcasing Violet's virtue (and, by extent, Yarros's) through Violet being happy for her having sex with another female rider later in the book.
(This isn't me discussing virtue signalling - yet. That's coming whenever we review Chapter 18. Let’s just tuck this detail away for now.)
Ultimately, Rhiannon could be cut with zero impact to the overall story.
Other
The characters of Mira and Violet's mother are respectively functional as the supportive older sister and cold, detached mother. Dain is not introduced in this chapter, but the fact that Mira points Violet to him to help her survive speaks volumes for his history with Violet. I will come back to Dylan.
PLOT
This is a solid start to the plot. Violet is being thrown into a death school and needs to survive long enough to bond with a dragon. We get a glimpse into the danger of her first test as a candidate. There is some minor foreshadowing for a decision Violet makes later in the book, which I'll get into down the line when I talk about the mechanics of this death school. Outside of those elements, I can't think of anything here that blew me away. It works, and it works well. It's as simple as that.
WORLDBUILDING
As stated many times by this point, the worldbuilding is what kills this book. It is what assassinates Violet as a character and feeds into the bloat of the plot. What could have been an incredible story of personal triumph is reduced to sludge because Yarros did not think through the implications of her fantastical elements of the systems of this society.
At this stage, though, the worldbuilding holds together. It promises great things to come. There is only one thing that really signals how much trouble we're in.
The Promise
In Navarre, dragon riders serve as an integral and elite corps within the national military. Their main purpose is to respond to raids by their counterparts from the neighboring kingdom of Poromiel, the gryphon riders. This is a military conflict that has raged for centuries, with no signs of stopping.
There's more to this than just monsters tearing into one another for their human allies, though. Humans in this setting cannot safely channel magic on their own - at least, not without being corrupted into entities known as venin (or so the old tales say). The dragons provide a safe go-between, feeding their riders enough magic to cast a handful of basic utility spells. Each rider is also gifted with a Signet ability (which I'm also going to treat as a proper noun for the purposes of this review, despite it not being that way in the book), which is basically a magical superpower. In this chapter, we learn that Violet's mother has a Signet that lets her generate and control storms, while Mira knows a rider who can alter the sizes of objects with his Signet.
The conflict between Navarre and Poromiel necessitates that every province provide an annual tithe of recruits for the war effort, sending conscripts if all else fails. However, due to the staggering mortality of the Riders Quadrant, only the children of rebellion leaders (whom I shall call “rebel children” for the remainder of this review) have ever been conscripted as riders.
The Riders Quadrant is not just deadly for its challenges. Because rider trainees far outnumber the dragons, they are encouraged to murder one another (with the implied philosophy of Survival of the Fittest). The only time that this is forbidden is when a rider is sleeping.
All of this information is successfully conveyed within the first chapter. There is a lot of potential here. Even with my disengagement due to what the narrative voice was setting up, I was intrigued by where Yarros would take this.
Dragonscale Plot Armor (requires attunement)
One of the two gifts that Mira gives Violet to help her survive in the college is a “vest-style corset” that incorporates scales from Mira's dragon, thereby protecting Violet from any knife attacks to the torso (which, given that the riders have an entire subculture about ritualistic knife combat, is very important). This vest was made with the help of the aforementioned rider with the size-changing Signet, shrinking down the scales so that they could be sewn into the garment. This same section of the scene also identifies that Violet has “hidden sheaths sewn diagonally along the rib cage”, though it is unclear whether is above or below the scale armor or if it's even part of the corset. (We don't even learn that there are six sheaths in total until Chapter 25.)
This one piece of gear was my first hint that Yarros had no idea how to worldbuild for Epic Fantasy.
First: why is this armor not standard issue for the military? Because, let's be clear: Mira invented this. In Chapter 26, we learn that she has “told [her] leadership” about it, and that they are “looking into it". This means that not only has no one considered it before, but they are not falling over themselves to replicate this obvious miracle technology.
The size-changing Signet is not presented as a new power, and the story later establishes that Navarre has both vast records about and established protocols for managing different Signet powers. Furthermore, Mira does not have any more incentive to protect Violet than any other rider with younger siblings in the college or, for that matter, any commanding officer losing riders to the gryphon attacks. It’s also not like the scales are that hard to come by, given that Mira just collected scales shed by her own dragon.
The military leadership had the knowledge, the resources, and the incentive to fabricate this armor before now. It is simply not credible that Mira is the first person to conceive of this technology, especially when she is not characterized as the inventive type. This would be like a soldier in the modern US Army inventing a hand-held laser pistol that can melt tanks while being powered by only a pair of AA batteries and casually handing said weapon down to a younger sibling in Basic.
Second, the sheaths.
I do not have an issue with the idea that one or even several knives could be concealed along someone's ribs, provided that someone was wearing the correct clothing. This is especially true for a woman, as I'm pretty sure that clothing could be tailored to maintain a void below the breasts where a knife could be positioned without altering the shape of the torso. This would be especially true for body armor, since body armor that crushes the breasts will have long-term health effects, so there's incentive to leave some room in the torso anyway. The idea that sheathes could be hidden inside this body armor is therefore plausible for me.
However, the way this garment is described convinces me that Yarros has never wielded a knife as a weapon and never tried to replicate the physical motion of drawing a knife from this type of sheath.
Violet could not be drawing these knives across her body. She would need a gap in the front of her clothing (or the armor itself, if the sheaths are under the armor) to do this. This would require the vest to hang open, either creating a hole through which she could be stabbed or exposing the pommels of the knives to anyone with a clear view of her sternum. She will survive a stabbing in Chapter 5, in a circumstance where someone would have been able to see and exploit a gap, so the vest clearly is not open. (Chapter 9 will also confirm that this vest laces up at the back.)
This means she needs to draw knives outward from the sides. Not only would said action require a very awkward chicken wing position every time she needs to draw a knife quickly (contradicting the assertion by this chapter that they are “easily accessible”), but this is surely a very risky move for someone with EDS to attempt. Violet would risk overextending a joint every time she draws a knife.
This would not have been hard to fix. All Yarros had to do was directly acknowledge that Violet's EDS gives her the flexibility to draw the knives. This would both address the unnatural angle and establish that the motion is within Violet's limits. (Yarros will later acknowledge that this flexibility is what allows Violet to lace and unlace the armor herself, but that is not until halfway through the book, and the fact that she never acknowledges it for the knife sheaths implies that she doesn't recognize the problem.) Alternatively, perhaps someone with more expertise in body armor and / or knife combat that me could explain this is a way that makes sense.
As it is, this armor sounds so ridiculous that Rule of Cool ceases to justify it. It is a red flag that Yarros has no idea how melee combat actually works.
To be clear, I am not saying the Rule of Cool is bad. Plenty of well-written Fantasy stories include elements that are absolute nonsense. The issue is that, much like with Violet’s disability, Yarros tries to have it both ways. As we’ll discuss when we get into the action scenes, she has no problems leaning deep into realism when it allows her to drive up the tension, but then she will abandon it for things like this vest without reconciling this disconnect.
Much like with the narrative voice, this body armor does not break the narrative. I just thought, on first read, that it was a troubling sign of things to come. That fear was later proven to be very valid.
CHARACTER DEATH
It's time to talk about Dylan.
The concept of this character is solid. Yarros has spent this first chapter hammering on the idea of how deadly the Quadrant is. She now needed to demonstrate it. Ending the chapter on the death of a character is an effective solution. Furthermore, the fact that this death was a secondary character in whom we have no genuine investment would have been difficult to avoid. There hasn't yet been time to build audience investment in anyone but the core cast, and killing off a core cast member would potentially eclipse the story Yarros wanted to tell. I therefore have no issue with Dylan being the character who dies here.
The issue is that Yarros clearly has no idea how to build up to a character death with anything resembling subtlety.
Dylan's death is telegraphed in one of the most overdone ways imaginable. Everyone knows that the secondary character who talks about his loved ones back home is the one who dies. It is such a cliche that Fullmetal Alchemist was lampshading it two decades ago.
When Dylan fell from the Parapet, I therefore felt nothing. That’s what happens when you introduce a character by telling the audience that he will die and then kill him without giving us time to get invested. There’s just no weight to the death.
This problem occurs throughout the book. A scene where a character dies will often begin by calling out how little death there has been (in Violet's immediate circle, at least). If we are supposed to feel bad about this character, Yarros will rush backstory and try to make the character sympathetic as quickly as possible. If this is a character whose death is supposed to be karmic, she will lay it on thick how unpleasant that character is so that the audience will be happy when he or she dies. I can name only one character death that it is at all effective, but that one is undermined by being in an incoherent mess of an action scene.
I suspect that a big part of this is that Yarros cannot bear to kill her darlings. In the case of Dylan's death and the death of one other sympathetic character, killing off Rhiannon would have been the better option from a narrative perspective. She serves no other function in the narrative except to be Violet's best friend, and nothing comes of that. Had she died here, after Violet had shared a boot with her, it would have hammered in just how lethal the college is, as the guy with the obvious death flag was spared while the person our Mary Sue tried to help was unceremoniously killed. In the second instance (which will come in Chapter 10), Rhiannon being Violet's established friend would have provided a far greater gut punch than the death of a character we only really got to know in that same chapter.
Maybe this method of handling death is typical on Romance novels. However, going back to the trigger warning, it is subpar in Fantasy, especially Epic Fantasy. This genre does not need to be a bloodbath, but its fans have been around the block enough to have their experience cheapened by an author taking shortcuts.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
Chapter 1 of Fourth Wing is a fine start. Most of the issues we've covered thus far are not issues with the chapter itself, but rather precursors of problems that will rear their heads as the story progresses. This chapter encapsulates both Yarros's experience and skill as a writer and the fact that she was unprepared to dive so deep into an unfamiliar genre. It represents the hope that, if she learns from the mistakes made with this book, the future books of The Empyrean series could be something fantastic.
ONWARD
In the next part, we shall cover Chapters 2 through 6, picking up on the Parapet and exploring Violet’s first full day within the Rider’s Quadrant. Much like Chapter 1, this part of the book features characterization that ranges from fantastic to inoffensively functional and builds up a formulaic but still enjoyable plot. However, this is also where the worldbuilding starts to buckle. Contradictions and unanswered questions swiftly snowball.
Welcome to the Quadrant, everyone. I’ll see you next week.
