Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

This is a fantasy romance book that’s all the rage right now. Naturally, I was curious, looked through Scribd and the audiobook was available.

I should have known….

The clues:

1. the hype
2. the fantasy romance genre

There’s only been one such book I’ve liked in my reading journey so far, it was the first ever book I read in the genre and the first in a popular series. That series quickly went downhill, I didn’t even finish it. But, I loved the first book at the time.

The Fourth Wing is the story of Violet, the daughter of the commanding general of Navarre, and she’s been training her whole life to become a scribe. Turns out her mother has other plans and off she goes to train to become a dragon rider.

This is more of a romance with a touch of fantasy than a fantasy romance. And even the romance was kind of questionable. And everyone is obsessed with sex. In the beginning, I had not understood nor read in the synopsis how old everyone is and wondered why these kids are constantly thinking about it. Then I took a break and turned to Goodreads and understood Violet is 20 and that was that.

There’s dragons, lots of them in fact. They’re not there all the time (complaint I’ve had for other dragon books), but present enough for me not to complain. Though I wish the process of them choosing their rider was explained in more detail as the concept is fascinating.

The writing is definitely not outstanding, the story is full of clichés, I predicted the plot twist, but weirdly I get the hype (see paragraphs above about sex and dragons above). Not quite the book for me, but my curiosity got the better of me.

Overall, an overhyped book, but I think I’m still going to give the sequel a chance.