Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

 

"Hope is a fickle, dangerous thing. It steals your focus and aims it toward the possibilities instead of keeping it where it belongs—on the probabilities."

Violet Sorrengail, frail and fragile, trained her whole life to be in Scribe Quadrant, wanting nothing more than to be surrounded by books, recording history. But her mother, the general, has other ideas. She's being sent to college to train in the Riders Quadrant to follow in the footsteps of her siblings to become a dragon rider. The problem? Besides being too weak to carry her own bag, she'll be in a school where every test she takes is graded by life or death and everyone wants her dead.

I can absolutely see what the fuss is about, this was a little addicting for me.

I was pulled in right away by the idea of Violet, this smart young woman with physical infirmities being forced into a war college where only the strongest survive. She's the heroine of the story, so you know she's going to survive, but since the odds aren't exactly in her favor, I was dying to know how.

Rebecca Yarros is a writer who has a good grasp on the concept of character evolution. Who the characters start out as, are not the same as who they are at the end... And that's just book one. What will they look like at the end of book 3? She also considered that relationships, like characters, must evolve too and it was interesting to see how the characters' interactions with each other progressed.

If you like your romantasy with a side of sexy, this book doesn't have an ugly man in it, assuming you like good hair, nice eyes, and muscles. In this world, they're all basically underwear models. Actually, I'm quite surprised at how many people marked this as a young adult read... The second half has some undeniably, graphically adult content. I wouldn't recommend this for a reader under the age of 18, but that's just me.

There were a couple of plot twists at the end, one was sadly predictable and made me feel as if plot twists are not the author's forte, but the second one was unexpected and redeeming.

My one big complaint is the unambitious world building. If RY had built a world the way she built a man, the story would have been perfect. I wanted to 'see' more than I did of the school and of the world it sat in. I just feel like the descriptions should have been pushed a little harder and there needed to be more of them. I also wish the characters hadn't been speaking English absolutely the whole time. If they're not in our world they wouldn't speak as we do... so a sentence, phrase, or even just a word or two in a new language would have added a degree of otherness. 

Over all, this story was an exciting read.