Review: Fourth Wing (The Empyrean, #1)

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I saw that this book topped the lists for most checked out book in 2023 in multiple library systems my curiosity was piqued. But it was this episode of Our Opinions are Correct that pushed me over the edge into getting this book. Boy am I glad I did!

How to describe this book? One of my thoughts was Ender’s game meets Harry Potter, but with college kids. But then I cam up with a better comparison: RF Kuang’s Poppy War Trilogy (first book: The Poppy War The Poppy War, but with Western settings. Is it dark academia? I’m not sure. I was a kickstarter funder for a few dark academia anthologies, but haven’t read them yet. No matter how it’s classified, it does (eventually) have some really graphic sex. Like, the beginning of the book has a warning about all the violence and how graphic the sex is. I think if you’ve read a romance book before, it’s probably nothing you haven’t heard before. But if you’re used to the usual sex scenes in SFF, this is quite a bit more.

When I first started listening, I thought this was maybe my first romantasy (a newly named category everyone is talking about nowadays), but then I remembered that even though the term didn’t really exist at the time, my first romance book was actually a romantasy – Marjorie Liu’s Tiger Eye.

Here’s the most important thing (if you’ve made it this far into my review) the reason I gave this book 4/5 stars on Goodreads is because it is a LEGIT good fantasy book on its own. If all of the romance and sex were cut out, it would still be a great fantasy book. The main point, to me, of the sex is to provide a very specific tension given the background history of the book. Also, while we’re once again on the sex and romance topic, while this might not be new to what is considered the main audience for romance (women), it was a fun experience for me to get a female-gaze POV on attraction, sex, etc. Obviously, it’s #notallwomen, but whatever Rebecca Yarros thought made sense for the protagonist (and/or MAYBE their own proclivities, but authors and their characters are NOT the same). Since most books I’ve read are usually written by men (although that is changing for the better) and since I am a man, this was like an entry into a world unlike my own. But also….foreshadowing for later!!

It’s no secret why this book did so well – as I mentioned, it’s a great fantasy and also romance sells better than you would think it does. But I think Yarros also does a few more things that helped to make this book appeal to a wider audience. First of all, Yarros does not fall into the SFF trap of Call a Rabbit a “Smeerp”. Despite almost certainly not taking place on Earth, the characters use our calendar. They speak like we do (which may make some of the dialog sound dated in the future rather than timeless). Most of their concerns make sense to us. I think that was a great move on Yarros’ part as it removes some of the barrier keeps folks away from fantasy.

I listened to the audiobook and the main narrator does a pretty good job with a structure that seems designed to be almost impossible to narrate. The book is primarily told in first person perspective from Violet’s point of view. That presents hardship number 1 – it can sometimes be a little hard to know if Violet is thinking something (because sometimes her thoughts are responses that she doesn’t speak aloud – like she’s thinking of a sarcastic answer, but doesn’t actually say it). The narrator does a good job and there were only a few places where I got confused. Then there’s the second hardship – in this world, people bonded with dragons speak to them telepathically. On the one hand, the narrator did a good job giving the dragons their own voices. On the other hand, once again I’m left uncertain of whether Violet is speaking aloud or with the dragon. I don’t want to give away the spoiler, but eventually, Violet is able to speak with someone telepathically. In this case, her voice is the same whether she’s speaking aloud or not. So there was a scene with her, the person she can telepathically speak to, and another person. And that time it did get a little confusing to know what was being said aloud. Overall, my point is that it’s probably BEST experience reading the book, but the audiobook is ALMOST flawless.

Quick aside, the fact that the dragon can hear Violet’s thoughts combined with the first person storytelling led to my favorite running gag – Violet insults the dragon in her head and he responds with some kind of variant on “I can hear you”.

Finally, I got the update version of the audiobook which has a couple chapters that revisit Violet’s chapters from a different point of view (one of the other main characters). It was fun to see what was going on in that person’s head during the scene.

I strongly recommend this book if you’re OK with explicit sex in your books. As I said, the fantasy part of it was great. The world building was great. I was able to predict one of the twists (because if you know anything about tropes, you could see it coming), but there were many other twists that made things a ton of fun. I already nabbed book 2 and I think I’m planning on riding this serious out through the planned 5 books.

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