Dragons Dragons Dragons! We finally got a chance to read the hottest book out there – Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros. This post is a book review of what we thought of it!
This post is the Slowprose book review of Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links which, if purchased from, may result in a small commission, at no cost to the buyer.
Slowprose Review Format
Generally speaking, we don’t think of ourselves as “serious” reviewers, so our format may be a little different. Here is what to expect when you are reading Slowprose book reviews:
- Cover Review – doing the cliche of judging a book by its cover.
- Book Blurb – we share the book jacket or Goodreads blurb about the plot.
- Intrusive Thoughts – these are the general thoughts and feelings we have about the book while reading it.
- Book review – our overall review and star ranking of the book
- Book aesthetics – this is how gorgeous we thought the pages of the book were, or how easy/hard it was to read, or how good the narrator was if it is an audio book.
- Book recommendations – we talk about the author’s other books or other books that remind us of this book in some form or fashion. Basically, this is our catch-all to talk about anything else that we want to.
To see our full review system, including our method of assigning and weighting stars, go here.
COVER REVIEW – FOURTH WING
This cover gets 3 stars. We know Fourth Wing is the hottest book out right now, and we think this cover is not bad, but we could have used MORE DRAGON. We love the color and the tagline, “Graduate…or die.” It’s so challenging and ominous. Fantastic! The design in the middle just makes it seem a bit muddled, and it takes a second to realize there are dragons in there. Dragons! If you have dragons in your book, we want all dragons, all the time.
BOOK BLURB – Fourth Wing
Given our extreme irrational fear of ever being a spoiler for any reader, we will just share the book insert or book blurb found on Goodreads to provide the information in terms of the plot:
Fourth Wing:
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
INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS – FOURTH WING
This main character, sigh.
So much talk early on about having her fair share of medical issues even before she enters the riding academy, and that she is worried about how dangerous it is because so many people die every year. Her sister even gives her special equipment before she goes because of the danger. All of that lead up. Then she gets there, and at every turn, when her friends are trying to look out for her, she’s like, I CAN DO THIS BY MYSELF YOU DON’T NEED TO PROTECT ME. Ugh. Inconsistent!
Freaking loved the introduction to the dragons and the imagery of it.
*Half way through the book* – is this entire book in the academy? Does she get a dragon in this book?
Eye roll at the insta-healing or managing of catastrophic injuries.
SUPER EYE ROLLING at the angsty romance.
Let’s get back to the dragons!!
BOOK REVIEW – FOURTH WING
Slowprose Star Rating – 3 Stars
Obviously this book has MAJOR hype, and we here at Slowprose are absolute maniacs for anything involving dragons, so we were super excited to finally get a chance to see what Fourth Wing was all about. Unfortunately, we came away somewhat disappointed. Here is the good, the bad, and the ugly from our perspective.
The Good:
- The entire premise of the book. We absolutely loved the concept, the world building, the challenges, the folklore and magic, loved all of that!
- The dragons. Love how they were introduced. Loved the imagery surrounding them. We expected them to be intelligent and they were, which was excellent. The connection with the signet to the rider was so good, loved that they needed each other to manifest it, so clever. Also really loved how they communicated with their riders and the building of the relationship that we see in the book. When Tairn yells out his rider’s signet power when it is discovered, we literally teared up. So good!
- The action scenes. Wow, these were freaking phenomenal! Our read was via audiobook (more on that below) and the action scenes literally stopped us in our tracks to listen. They were beyond riveting and exciting!
- The twists! We are readers that are generally along for the ride and don’t really try to figure things out, in terms of rooting out twists. There were a few really good twists in Fourth Wing that completely surprised us. We loved them!
The Bad:
- The proaganist. She was kind of annoying TBH. Didn’t find ourselves rooting for her like we wanted to. She was clever and fearless, which we liked, but she was just not necessarily likeable. We absolutely liked that she didn’t let anything stop her (although we are still not sure exactly what her disability was based on? Did we miss that?).
- The narration. We can be picky about narrators. We wonder if we would have liked Fourth Wing better, or at least had a different perspective if we would have read it rather than listened to the audiobook? We might not have been as annoyed with Violet if we would have read the book? We will say that the narration during the action scenes was great. It was intense and fast paced and had us at the edge of my seat. The energy the narrator put into those scenes was on point and she pulled them off spectacularly. But other than the action scenes, we didn’t love the narration. We found it to be grating.
The Ugly:
- The unbelievably cringy romance. Oh my gosh. Now, we were not surprised that there was some romance in the book, but what we were expecting was a super amazing fantastic fantasy story with dragons and a side of romance. What we weren’t expecting was Violet and her love interest circling each other the whole book and being all angsty. Ugh. We love us some angst but this one just did not work for us. Toss in some much raunchier spicy scenes than we were expecting and we were just kind of like…..can we get back to the dragons?
- We know, we know. This whole romance/spice aspect is one of the reasons this book is so popular, and we typically love this stuff, but for some reason it just was not giving what we wanted it to give in Fourth Wing.
Even though we really loved the world that was built in Fourth Wing, the characters and romance was so offputting to us that we aren’t interested in picking up the second book in the series, Iron Flame, even though it was just released.
A third (and final) book is also on tap to be released in the future. Which is too bad, because we did love the whole dragon thing.
We gave Fourth Wing three stars based on the “good” section listed above. It is clear, however, that we are in the minority when it comes to Fourth Wing! All the reviews we see are people raving about it, so definitely give it a try and see what you think!
Slowprose Star Rating – 3 Stars
BOOK AESTHETICS
We listened to the audio version of Fourth Wing.
As mentioned above, we have mixed feelings about the narrator. She fit the action scenes really well, but we didn’t particularly enjoy the narration for the other parts of the book.
Programming Note for Slowprose reviews on audiobooks!
Typically we have two books going at once – one audio and one physical.
Most of the time, when we listen to an audiobook we don’t have a physical copy of the book to take pictures of. We love to feature pictures of the book because, well, we are nerdy like that. We love book pics! So, we figured that reviews of audio books would be a great opportunity to feature other content creators and their incredible book pictures!
In this post you have seen the incredible pictures from Lauren from The Book Script and Sophie from Everything Sophie Reads featured. Please do go visit their feeds! Yay for fellow book lovers!!
We are super excited for this concept, and will continue to use this format with all audiobook reviews!
BOOK RECOMMENDATION
Books with dragons in them are our jam. We love us some dragons! So if you loved Fourth Wing, and especially the dragon and world building aspect of it, here are some books we think you will love.
The Temeraire Series by Naomi Novik is the first book we remember reading about dragons and we were completely entranced with it. The entire series is 9 books, with the first one being His Majesty’s Dragon. We have featured three different covers of book one just because we think they are so gorgeous!
We have to also include Game of Thrones because they have epic dragons! But, confession time. Ack. We haven’t read these yet. We are on the fence about reading them because we were absolutely, wholeheartedly, bought in to this TV series. It was SO amazing and we highly highly recommend it. It is in our top 5 shows of all time! THE DRAGON SCENES ARE SO FREAKING AMAZING!!!
To attract younger readers to the wonder of dragons, check out the Enchanted Forest Chronicles.
You can see all these and more in our storefront, Slowestuff Books From The Blog storefront.
If you are looking for more book posts, check out the Slowprose section of the blog where we have some posts about Stephen King books and Sarah J. Maas books, among others.
If you are looking for more dragons, in a completely different context, go check out Dragon of Mayhem Crafters, the crafty section of the blog!
We hope you have enjoyed this book review of Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros. Please tell us in the comments what you thought of Fourth Wing!
Happy reading!
Slowprose – Book Division of Slowestuff
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