Fourth Wing (Prelude)
Let us discuss what success as an author looks like.
Rebecca Yarros is a Romance Novelist with more than 15 published novels under her belt (19 in total, if one counts her work with a co-author). This massive body of work was all put out in the past 10 years. At the same time, she has managed to maintain a military marriage, raise 6 children, and co-found the One October charitable foundation with her husband.
This is a writer who has earned accolades and built a sizeable fan base. Having read just one of her books (her 20th, if we count the co-authored books), I think she has earned it. She understands how to do strong characterization and character arcs. While some portion of her success may be attributed to her being a good Romance writer specifically - in other words, her skills won't necessarily translate well into other genres - from what I have seen of her work on writing romance subplots, I don't think that's a strike against her. We all have our talents and our passions. Good on her for finding where she fits.
On top of this well-earned success, Yarros is not afraid to branch out and experiment. Her 20th novel, Fourth Wing, is an Epic Fantasy (not even Romantic Fantasy, but outright Epic Fantasy with a romance subplot). She has already committed herself to writing a 5-part epic, The Empyrean, of which Fourth Wing is the first installment and Iron Flame, the second installment, is due for release on November 7th.
We could all aspire to accomplish what Yarros has.
I want to establish all of this up front because even successful writers with an established track record can publish atrociously bad books. With Fourth Wing, Yarros has demonstrated this very fact. Fourth Wing is, by far, the worst book yet reviewed on this site.
Just how bad is it?
Well, the reviews for Shadow of the Conqueror, Notorious Sorcerer, and The City of Brass each needed 5 parts to fully explore and understand what worked, what didn't, and why. Including this prelude and the final retrospective, the review of Fourth Wing needs 13.
REACTION
Those of you who are members of the Shadiversity Discord server may be acquainted to the reactions that I was posting in the #literature channel while reading Fourth Wing. While I stand by everything I said in those reactions - every trope and derivation mocked, every cartoonish freak-out involving emojis - it was, ultimately, all intended on good fun.
In fact, up until the halfway point of this book, I was fully prepared to leave a glowing review. Yes, this book had problems prior to that point, yet it was also demonstrating that derivative or highly formulaic works are not inherently bad. I was fully prepared for praise Yarros for what she had done here.
Even after reading the whole thing, I don't think that the core problem with this book is the tropes and cliches. It is not that the main character is a self-insert Mary Sue. It is not the formulaic romance subplot. (That last is arguably the strongest element, and it's the reason I know Yarros has earned her success despite this atrocity being the only book of hers that I have read.)
No, the problem is that Yarros was simply not prepared for the task of writing an Epic Fantasy. She had no prior experience. She has no idea how to worldbuild an entire secondary world. She did not think through how the elements she was introducing would ripple outward to assassinate characters, reduce action scenes to incoherent sludge, and poison what would otherwise be a formulaic but still engaging romance. (It seems that she also doesn't know how to write action-adventure or thriller stories, though the mistakes made in those aspects pale in comparison to the catastrophic worldbuilding.)
Worst of all, she clearly had no one - no beta-readers, no one in the publishing chain - with both the experience and the will to call out the many issues or point out how she could correct those issues with minimal rewrites.
MESSAGE TO THE AUTHOR
Ms. Yarros, if you read this, please understand that my contempt for Fourth Wing does not extend to you personally. I have the utmost respect for your success. Neither am I writing this behemoth review merely to spit on your work.
I think myself and my readers can learn from this failure. There is a vast fortune of lessons here on the wrong way to do things (and a few points of praise for things done well). If you decide to come along for this ride, I hope that you will take my feedback constructively. It is too late to save Iron Flame from making the same mistakes as Fourth Wing, but perhaps the third through fifth installments of The Empyrean can recover.
STATS
Title: Fourth Wing
Series: The Empyrean (Book 1)
Author(s): Rebecca Yarros
Genre: Fantasy (Epic)
First Printing: 2023
Publisher: Red Tower Books
SPOILER WARNING
We are going to do things a bit differently with this review. Rather than break down aspects of this book as individual entities, we are going to go through the plot in chronological chunks. Issues will be explored as they develop. This will allow us to understand how things started so strong and deteriorated over time.
By necessity, this will mean heavy spoilers for the entirety of this book, but I will structure this series to give you all control over just how much is spoiled for you. 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). You can even treat this as a sort of book club, reading along bit by bit and comparing your reactions and conclusions to my own. I will be sure to conclude each part by specifying which chapters will be covered in the next part, allowing you to plan ahead.
PREMISE
I should note that this is the first review where I had to use an e-book instead of a physical copy. I don't have the actual back cover blurb. We shall therefore have to trust that Barnes & Noble either copy-pasted the blurb or took only minor liberties.
Blurb
Enter the brutal and elite world of a war college for dragon riders from New York Times 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.
Overview
Barnes & Noble also provided this snappy overview:
A young scribe is thrust into an elite war college for dragon riders where the only rule is graduate or perish. An addictive fantasy with epic levels of spice and world-building.
My Thoughts
The overview is accurate in the broad strokes, though the treatment of worldbuilding as a selling point is so laughable that I find myself wondering whether it constitutes false advertising.
The details are another matter. The death school element is exaggerated, both in the blurb and in the book itself. Violet being fragile - more specifically, her body being “brittle” - is something that has promise at the start of the book but ultimately fades into the background (though the fact that she is small does have a slightly larger role).
In my interlude on the New Adult genre, I compared Fourth Wing to the chimera that would result if Shou Tucker tried to recreate the Dragonriders of Pern series by fusing Eragon with a smut fanfiction of Divergent. I stand by this assessment. Perhaps Yarros has indeed read the Pern series and wanted to do a modern version of it, but with the way everything from the colors of the dragons to the hedonistic sexuality of the characters are handled, this really reads more like a derivative of a derivative of Pern (in other words, like a derivative of Eragon) that re-injected the sexual elements after the first derivative strained them out.
Also, I would like to call attention to how meandering this blurb is. It's not tightly focused, like so many other blurbs we've covered, but rather bounces from one element to the next. This is foreshadowing for the issues with the book's plot that we'll get into down the line.
GENRE
I have seen people classify this book as Romantic Fantasy (or “Romantasy”, as at least a few folks in the publishing world are calling it). It also has elements of the New Adult genre, given the tropes and plot beats at play. Neither will have any weight on this analysis.
Romantasy
Much like Notorious Sorcerer, this book was marketed as Epic Fantasy. Look back over the blurb and the overview. What are the main selling points? Because the romance isn't one of them. In fact, the only acknowledgement of romance elements is the mention of “spice” in the overview (which was written by a specific vendor, not within the blurb itself). Even there, it is treated as an additive, much the same way I would describe adding an extra tablespoon of honey to my curry.
Setting aside the marketing, what is presented to us on the page isn’t a Romance story. At most, there is a romance subplot. It’s romance subplot that is functional, written by someone who have immense experience in writing for the Romance genre, but this is not the core of the story. The core of the story is the Epic Fantasy narrative about Violet’s first year of training as a dragon rider. You could remove the romance outright without changing the central narrative.
All this is the say that I shall not being making considerations to account for the formulaic writing of the Romance genre. Praise will be given as it is due for when Romance elements pop up and are done well, but the assessment of objective quality will be the same as for any other Epic Fantasy. If Fourth Wing is going to follow in the steps of Notorious Sorcerer by presenting itself as an Epic Fantasy, and if it is going to be sold as Epic Fantasy, it shall be judged by those standards.
New Adult
This book is the incarnation of everything wrong with the New Adult genre. Yes, it checks all the boxes for protagonist age, voice, themes, and mature content, yet it also manifests the worst aspects of Young Adult literature while being marketed towards adults. I legitimately thought this was badly written Young Adult with smut before I looked up Yarros and realized that she was instead trying to inject Romance into a poorly constructed Epic Fantasy.
I read this book before writing the New Adult interlude, so it should not come as a shock that my position on New Adult has not changed as of the time of writing this review. Fourth Wing will be treated the same as literature for adults. If Yarros wanted to be given the same leeway as a Young Adult author, she should have cut out the pornography and committed to the age bracket.
Speaking of which …
CONTENT WARNING
The Trigger Warning
Fourth Wing is a nonstop-thrilling adventure fantasy set in the brutal and competitive world of a military college for dragon riders, which includes elements regarding war, battle, hand-to-hand combat, perilous situations, blood, intense violence, brutal injuries, death, poisoning, graphic language, and sexual activities that are shown on the page. Readers who may be sensitive to these elements, please take note, and prepare to enter Basgiath War College...
Your eyes have not deceived you. That was not a formatting glitch. I was not being facetious with the section header. I just quoted the trigger warning that was included inside this book.
I should like this inclusion. I think I've made it clear by now that I don't appreciate authors surprising me with pornography based on their personal fantasies and fetishes. A trigger warning seems like such an elegant solution to this problem.
However, this trigger warning is fundamentally off-base in every single detail. It demonstrates that Yarros has no experience writing for Epic Fantasy and minimal experience with reading Epic Fantasy.
(Maybe this trigger warning was mandated by her publisher, so I don't fault Yarros for merely including it, but given the way it is written, I get the impression that Yarros at least penned it. I will therefore hold her accountable for what she included and how she chose to present that information.)
All of the Violence
This may just be the least violent or graphic Fantasy book that I've reviewed. Not every Fantasy is as gory as A Song of Ice and Fire (though the influence of that series may have encouraged an uptick in gritty realism), but until the Cozy Fantasy subgenre drowns the market, I feel like most Fantasy readers will expect the things that the trigger warning lists with regards to violence. Maybe this was included so that Yarros's established audience wouldn't be blindsided as they explored a new genre, yet if that is the case, it proves that Yarros has stepped well outside of the niche she's familiar with to write this book.
Swearing
I don't know why this one is here.
There is certainly a lot of swearing in this book, but the execution doesn't make the book feel gritty or mature. If anything, the effect is a bit like when I catch 9-year-olds giving each other the middle finger. The perpetrator is clearly trying to be edgy and mature, but the lack of actual weight or understanding behind the gesture is so obvious that it is less scandalous and more worthy of an eye-roll. It makes the story feel less mature. Some of the other reviews I’ve seen for this book observed that Violet feels like she’s 14, rather than 20. Just from the swearing, I think that’s a valid take.
That’s not to say the swearing doesn’t impact the reader experience. However, the issue is less with the maturity of the content and more with what it does to the narrative voice. That is something we'll discuss more next week.
Sexual Activities that are Shown on the Page
Pornography, Ms. Yarros. There is no sugarcoating or getting around this. It's straight-up pornography.
I realize that this assertion may not have much weight coming from me. However, even if I had never commented on sexual content in prior reviews, I would still call out Fourth Wing for its pornographic content.
I did not read the first two sex scenes in full - once the foreplay kicked off, I planted a bookmark, skimmed ahead to find where it ended, and planted another bookmark - but I did have to skim them to find where they ended, and I read the third sex scene in its entirety. What I was every bit as graphic as the contents of an Internet sewage pipe.
The sex scene in Chapter 30 is eight pages long.
The first sex scene in Chapter 32 is three pages long.
The second sex scene is Chapter 33 is only four paragraphs, beginning in medias res after what I can only describe as a mid-scene smash cut.
The Romance genre overall is often stigmatized as pornography. I think this is an unfair generalization that overemphasizes a single element that is not an essential inclusion. However, if Yarros's other books have sex scenes, and this is how she writes those sex scenes, then she is feeding the fire. Content like this is precisely why Romance has the stigma in the first place.
Also, since I’ve already seen people on Twitter defending the pornography on the grounds that this is Romance: please go back up to the Premise. This book was not marketed as Romance or Romantasy. That defense does not apply. Furthermore, defending the pornography by saying that it is a Romance book is an admission that the stigma upon the genre is an accurate reflection of its true nature. I do not believe that is the takeaway that the people making this argument want.
Fantasy, especially, Epic Fantasy, is no stranger to sex scenes. Thanks to A Song of Ice and Fire, there also seems to be something of a wave of more graphic material. We have reviewed several books on this site where the author flexed his or her fetishes on the audience. Notorious Sorcerer was nothing but erotica wearing the shell of Epic Fantasy.
However, the thing about sex in Epic Fantasy is that, outside of bad Game of Thrones knock-offs, it is typically handled in a brief or fade-to-black manner. Even the books of A Song of Ice and Fire, despite the prolific sex, typically kept the actual sex scenes brief.
The Locker Room Talk comedy bit from How I Met Your Mother is a good analogy here. (For those not familiar, the joke presented in said bit is that, while men talk about sex with their friends, they are mortified by the prospect of sharing the intimate or graphic details that women do.) Fantasy authors have no qualms about sharing their sexual fantasies, and it can often be objectifying and crass, but they at least maintain some awareness of why the audience is actually there. They say the minimum that needs to be said to convey their ideas (even if those ideas are extraneous sexual fantasies) and move along. To pay a compliment to Notorious Sorcerer, it got this right. For all of the excessive sexual tension, the actual sex between Siyon and Izmirlian was limited to about a page of non-graphic foreplay.
Fourth Wing, a book written by an established Romance author, is the first one we’ve reviewed that makes the pornography a feature rather than an additive. The fact that the warning fails to acknowledge this difference in handling reflects a blind spot born of inexperience.
Now, outside of the pornography, there is the matter of the dragon riders having very hedonistic sex lives (“hedonistic” is the word used by the book itself). This also represents a failure to understand the genre, though not because of its execution. Rather, the issue lies in Yarros’s attempt to tie it back into the lore.
The sex lives of the riders is what really tipped me off to Yarros trying to recreate Pern without using Pern as a direct inspiration. The dragon riders of the Pern series are also quite promiscuous. The critical difference is that the sexual activity within the dragon rider Wyrs of Pern is justified by the rules of the world. You could not cut it out without fundamentally altering the dragons and the social structure of the Wyrs.
Here, Yarros just layers the hedonism on top of the story. The main character, Violet, doesn’t even partake in it herself. The threadbare excuse given for it (that the looming risk of death makes everyone chase every possible pleasure) is not explored. Because it is not explored, it could be removed without affecting anything else. Even the aforementioned pornography is not actually linked to it, as that is a payoff to a specific subplot.
It is blatantly clear that the hedonistic sex was introduced to bait the audience. It is about holding on to reader’s attention with anticipation. By doing so in such an artificial manner, it joins the swearing in screwing with the narrative voice.
A NOTE TO READERS
Judging by the storm brewing on Twitter at the time of writing this, there are many people who are less than happy with the criticism leveled at Fourth Wing. It so seems to have kicked off fresh debate (or, at least, low-quality Twitter soapboxing) about the validity of sex scenes in literature, which seems to have started because folks started memeing about this book's pornographic content. (It's possible that the timing is just coincidental, with Fourth Wing just getting sucked into it due to its recent surge in popularity, but regardless, the two are now entwined.)
I normally wouldn't acknowledge this. However, I want this review series go be taken with an open mind, so that we can all improve as writers. I therefore wish to offer an olive branch to people who liked this book and aren't happy with the criticism.
I like Sword Art Online. Yes, that Sword Art Online. I am well aware that it is awfully written. People reminding me of that fact does not diminish my unironic enjoyment of it. At the same time, that enjoyment does not make it any less poorly written.
Likewise, you are free to like this book. Doing so won't negate the flaws in its writing. Acknowledging those flaws also shouldn't negate your enjoyment. If it does, then the solution is to find entertainment that either doesn't have said flaws or that you can enjoy while acknowledging the flaws. Trying to drown out the criticism outright or dismiss it out of hand is an admission that there is no objective argument to oppose said criticism.
Regarding the specific subset of the audience that supports this book / rejects criticism towards this book because it provides representation for Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome: I'll address your concerns more directly when we hit Chapter 18. All I'll say for now is that anyone who demands Representation should not be satisfied with objectively poor work. You are free to celebrate it as a milestone, but the point of milestones is to mark distance traveled, not the end of the road. We are supposed to move beyond them.
RATING: 2/10
Yes, this book is worse than Notorious Sorcerer.
Yarros's experience and discipline should elevate this book above Evans's superficial fanfiction, but at least Evans demonstrates an understanding of what genre she's writing for. As shallow and broken as the worldbuilding in Notorious Sorcerer is, at least it isn't actively at war with the narrative.
Because, ultimately, genre is what kills this book. Yarros is a good writer. She has earned her success. I can say this, despite this awful book being the only one of hers that I've read, because the evidence is on the page. It is a failure to understand Fantasy in general and the Epic Fantasy subgenre specifically that undermines everything she did here. I admire Yarros for trying to get out of her comfort zone by writing something new, but she desperately needs to do more research or to find beta-readers who are willing to think critically about her lore and how said lore alters the plot and characters.
LET'S BEGIN
Next week, we will review Chapter 1.
Not every chapter will warrant a dedicated part. Fourth Wing has 39 chapters, and even with us doing multiple chapters per part, we will barely finish this series before Christmas. Chapter 1 warrants special attention because it demonstrates both the virtues and the soon-to-be crippling flaws of this entire text. It is worth exploring on isolation to understand the foundation with which are we working.
Saddle up, folks. We're going in.
