Fourth Wing

Fourth Wing
Rebecca Yarros, 2023

Premise: Violet's mom is making her go to dragon rider school even though she doesn't want to and it's dangerous. But her sworn enemy is hot. Somehow these characters are not teenagers. 

I tried, y'all. I tried to go in with an open mind. The writing isn't terrible, in that the pacing mostly trips along briskly, some of the description is fine, and the exciting bits are sometimes kind of exciting. 

But MY GOD. The vapid characters, the complete lack of interesting or believable world-building, and the extremely predictable plot "twists" had me struggling to make it to the end. 

You're telling me the hot rebel guy is actually nice, and also on the morally right side? I'm so shocked. 

And then the narration awkwardly has to remind us that our heroine is 20, so we can stick in an explicit sex scene. 

Y'all. I am not against sex scenes. And these were.... fine? Not terrible. But they didn't progress the plot or the characters at ALL. It isn't like good-romance-novel sex, where the sex enhances the characters' relationships. It's mediocre porn, where it's shoehorned in, they can't keep their hands off each other for no other reason that A) they're both attractive, and B) the author read Pern as a kid. (Yup, their dragons are mates, which is dealt with in a less rapey way than in 1968, but it's still not great.)

Is "New Adult" just code for "I wrote a YA book but changed three sentences to make the characters older so they can have lots of sex"? Because that's what it feels like here. 

The setting makes no sense. Why do most of the kids college students die in dragon rider trials? (Aside from the fact that everyone still wants to be The Hunger Games.) But even if you take the explanation that the dragons only bond with strong candidates, there is literally no reason for most of the trials to be deadly. They could disqualify kids left and right and send them to do other things. In a nation facing apparently endless war, young, healthy people are not an infinite resource that you should be squandering!

Ugh. This is one of those books that I was just disappointed in when I finished reading, but dislike it more and more when I think about it. 

We're told that Violet is physically weak and mentally strong, but then she becomes physically strong as well and I never felt like she was portrayed as actually weak, just not a physical powerhouse. She bonds with the specialest dragon and then has trouble manifesting her special dragon power, only for it to (obviously) be the most crazy badass one. It's just all so... predictable and boring. 

1 Star, maybe 1.5 - Didn't Like it