Review: Iron Flame

Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros
My rating: 3 of 5 stars



I said about six weeks ago or so, when I finally read Fourth Wing after months of hype, that I wasn't gonna continue with the series. But thanks to several friends in one particular Discord chat (#the-void in Z Brewer's Minion Horde server), as well as one of the doctors I'm in a book club with (and her assistant), I was convinced to give Iron Flame a shot when a copy showed up on the Lucky Day shelf at the library up the street from my workplace.

Of course, that copy happened to be one of those that was very poorly printed, with the first few pages already starting to flop, the black sprayed edges flaking in a couple of spots, and very ugly blurred text on a few pages around the neighborhood of 250-300 or so. I'm told that these first printings were kind of a rush job to maintain the series' hype with this book coming out only six months after its predecessor, and...yeah, this is why Bloomberg published an article calling this series in particular, and the Red Tower branch of Entangled in general, the fast fashion of the literary world.

That said, while this book didn't need to be 600 pages long, and was still highly derivative as hell, especially of the works of Sarah J. Maas and Veronica Roth, it was nevertheless an improvement over the first book in a few ways. I did feel like, as predictable as I suspected the book would be, it still had a lot of room for a lot of surprises and unexpected twists in the story, not to mention managing to keep the tension alive between Violet and Xaden despite how quickly the first book speed-ran their "enemies to lovers" routine. Xaden keeps a lot of secrets to his name, and when Violet inevitably finds them out, they're more likely to have a shouting match than a furniture-busting sex sesh (at least these don't go on and on nearly as long as SJM's equivalent scenes in ACOTAR and sequels.) At least, for a while, he starts calling Violet by her real name, but then about halfway through the book, Yarros remembered his cringey nickname for her...yeah, calling her "Violence" wasn't funny the first time, and it's still not funny the eleventy-first time either.

And to think Yarros went out of her way to demonize Dain just to make that supreme douchecanoe Xaden look less toxic in comparison, and now calls herself in a Today Show interview a "Dain apologist" and says that it kills her when people say he's an evil little shit just like Tamlin...like, Ms. Yarros, you took a perfectly good childhood-friend-to-lover character, one that would've done a great job subverting the current enemies-to-lovers trend, and did him dirty as hell in exactly the same Salami house style as Tamlin. And I for one won't forgive you for that anytime soon, any more than I'll ever forgive you for killing off Liam in the first book. If I was given a job to rewrite this series, I'd definitely change both of those. At the very least, Violet and Liam as endgame if I couldn't make Violet and Dain work.

The reason I'm giving this one an extra star compared to its predecessor is because, just like Red Queen, it knows when to turn up the psychological tension above all. Especially when General Sorrengail's sinister colleagues, like Dain's father, and the dreaded Major Varrish (who in my mind resembles an even darker version of Burn Gorman's Peacekeeper commander character in the new Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes movie) are involved, making life hell for our heroes when they have to hide so hard that they know the adults know that they know. You know?

Sure, the worldbuilding is still half-baked as hell - Yarros still tends towards big damn infodumps in Violet's POV, and apparently she's trying to improve her grasp of the Gaelic language (infamously poor before, but I'm a little more inclined to forgive her since she also said in the Today Show interview that she's actually Scottish on her mom's side) - but at least this world would look pretty damn lovely on screen if Michael B. Jordan and Prime Video don't skimp on the special effects budget in the upcoming series adaptation. (Hopefully it'll also be better written than the Wheel of Time adaptation, though that's already an incredibly low bar to clear.)

The other reason is that there's a death I didn't see coming at the end of this book (in a chaotic battle reminiscent of Rhythm of War, and a final scene that sets up a cliffhanger that not only reminds me of the ending of Beautiful Creatures, but also suggests that someone else might get committed to Malek, if Yarros doesn't chicken out of it the way SJM's done twice now in different series (and I will be pissed as hell if Salami pulls it off again in House of Flame and Shadow next year.)

All I will say about that, Ms. Yarros, is...



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