Review: Fourth Wing

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I'm being generous with the extra star for this one, and it's mostly because I can relate to Violet wanting to be a scribe, rather than a soldier. It's too bad she had to have a mother who comes off like a watered down version of the Commandant from An Ember in the Ashes who wouldn't allow her to pursue a path she really wanted at Basgiath War College.

I say "watered down" because unfortunately, for a book full of dragonfire and burning passions, a lot of the story is watered-down versions of so many YA and NA fantasy greatest hits from the last ten years:

* General Sorrengail, the aforementioned knockoff of the Commandant (though maybe that's not such a bad thing since the Commandant is one of the darkest and most ruthless villains in YA history)
* The ridiculously dangerous initiations of Dauntless from Divergent - right down to the perilous entrance into the College, Xaden being an even more aggressive version of the Training Instructor from Hell like Four, and a couple of downright psychotic fellow first-years reminiscent of Tris's biggest haters
* The centuries-long war that's lasted this long pretty much for no reason at this point, and it's war just to be war, like with Norta and the Lakelands in Red Queen
* The enemies-to-lovers love triangle that imitates ACOTAR but on speed, taking what could've been a trilogy of tension and deciding which ship will sail within a single book, all because they bonded with an already mated pair of dragons
** related: Yarros clearly has her fave just like SJM always does, and it shows in how she completely ignores her own character development and reverses the personality polarities of the male leads so the likable one suddenly becomes unlikable
** related: Tahereh Mafi did the enemies-to-lovers triangle so much better than Yarros or Maas ever did, and also made a fantastic trilogy of tension
* spoilery but the book also imitates the surprise new POV from ACOMAF and a key plot twist or two from Red Queen on the last page

And that's before getting into how bizarre this setting is with its blending of high fantasy dragon warfare with distractingly modern prose (I just flipped open the book and found a chapter opening with "What. The. Hell." - like, this would've worked so much better if the setting had been a bit more Crescent City than ACOTAR, y'know?), and yet it's also medieval enough that characters take "fertility suppressant" instead of "birth control" - just so much silliness, and so much hype damage that once again makes me look sideways at any and all "BookTok" recommendations. I would hope that my own books never make it there.

So yeah...#sorrynotsorry but I will not be continuing with this series.

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