Not that this will surprise you, if you’ve talked to me in the last two weeks. Or if you’ve talked to my friends, my officemates, the director of my library, its maintenance person, the assistant manager of the local Barnes & Noble, or either of the other post calvin editors.
I can’t shut up about this book, and it’s starting to become a problem.
For those of you who aren’t in bookish fields and are therefore possibly blissfully unaware, Fourth Wing is the first novel in a new romantic fantasy series (romantasy, if you’re hip) by romance-but-not-before-fantasy author Rebecca Yarros. It dropped in May last year and was followed in November by its sequel, Iron Flame. Both books are over five-hundred pages long and there are three more planned in the series.
My personal Fourth Wing saga started back in June 2023, when I emailed one of our collections librarians something to the effect of, “Hey, I keep noticing this book popping up in recommendation lists around the internet and there are a ton of holds on our ebooks—any chance we could get a physical copy for the collection?” To which she responded saying that the book was sold out at both of our suppliers and we probably wouldn’t be able to get a copy from a third-party seller before the end of the fiscal year, but she’d try again in July. Fair enough; the book’s publisher was a new imprint and sometimes when things blow up on TikTok they do become hard to find if you’re not interested in giving Jeff Bezos your book money.
So I figured she had it covered and forgot about Fourth Wing. The rest of the reading world didn’t.
Fourth Wing has been on the New York Times Bestseller List for over nine months. Fourth Wing sold over two million copies. Fourth Wing was the highest-circulating title of 2023 at Kent District Library, a system that checks out over a million books a year. Fourth Wing has 4.61 stars after 1.1 million ratings on Goodreads (a website where, for comparison, Brandon Sanderson’s—arguably the most popular living fantasy author—most-reviewed book has a 4.48 rating from 662,000 people).
Fourth Wing is also a crap book.
I didn’t know that for sure until about two weeks ago, but Fourth Wing had started getting under my skin around the time that its sequel came out. My coworkers were split; half of those who’d read it loved it and the other half were ambivalent at best. One fellow librarian hated it with a heat to rival dragon flame and dropped it after a couple days, but she only finishes one in four books anyway, so who could say? I knew that romantasy wasn’t my genre and since I was already biased against it, I decided to pass on Fourth Wing.
And then that one librarian said that she’d finish it if I did, and misery loves company and I love misery. What the hell. It could be fun.
Reader, it was not fun.
A lie—it was fun. It was fun to be comically outraged at how awful Fourth Wing was. It was fun to interrupt my coworkers’ lunches whenever I came across the next eyerollingly embarrassing scene. It was fun to read a sentence like “at least one of us was getting some much needed orgasms” and laugh—actually, out loud, laugh—at ye olde workout equipment and the fact that a man dies immediately after telling us about his girl back home and characters who think that “Violence” is an adorably clever nickname for a woman named “Violet.” It was fun to write an unabashedly caustic review on Goodreads. It was fun to rage at the degradation of the fantasy genre and feel myself superior to the unwashed masses.
But it was also a little sad.
Some people, a lot of them people I like and respect, say that while they know Fourth Wing isn’t really any good, they still enjoyed it. But a lot more say that it’s actually good. That it’s worth the hype and the thirty dollars (please, use your local library), it’s a swoon-worthy romance with compelling characters and good pacing and quality writing, and people who say that it’s bad or a bad fantasy are misogynistic gatekeepers who are mad because Fourth Wing fans are almost exclusively women.
Fourth Wing is a product. Of course this is true of most media and even most art, but the saddest thing about Fourth Wing is how much of a product it is.
When we received our copies of Iron Flame, I popped one open to discover that the first page was a list of “BookTok Praise for Fourth Wing,” followed by the traditional industry quotes from similar authors who don’t want to be on the internet’s bad side and a vaguely pandering content warning. Unlike many copies of Iron Flame and the special edition of Fourth Wing that was released on the same day, none of ours were printed backwards or upside down or missing pages or had the wrong title on the spine. Six months is a ludicrously quick turnaround for any sort of sequel, especially a six-hundred-pager, and the rollout of Iron Flame was hilariously mismanaged and a lot more fun than the rest of Fourth Wing’s periphery drama (including a predictable dust-up when the author posted her opinions on the conflict in Gaza on Instagram). The library copy of Fourth Wing that I read did have a cutting error, causing half the pages to be ragged and pilling on the edges and ended with advertisements for two other books (one of which was based on a series of TikToks, coincidentally).
We’ve all seen capitalism come for the things we love, and this is far from the first time it’s come for books. The librarian friend who shared my Fourth Wing MAD pact thinks it’s so popular because of the marketing money put behind it. People were told to like Fourth Wing, and they do. If you measure success in dollars, Rebecca Yarros, her agent, and publisher now have millions. If you measure success in fans, the score comes out similarly.
But if you measure success in the ability to change a person or their trajectory, or in the sublimity of a well-structured sentence, I don’t think Fourth Wing will be counted among this century’s (or even this decade’s) greats. I’m not a betting woman, but I’ll give you good odds that we won’t be talking about Fourth Wing in ten years, or five.
Please, read good books. Read Fourth Wing too if you’re so inclined, but read good books. Read books that light you up with a turn of phrase. Read books that see how ugly you are, and the world. Read books that piece you back together. Read books that no publisher would take.
And then, kindly, tell me about them.
I LOVE your last paragraph. I’ve been on a bit of a thriller novels tear. But I’m missing books that make me stop and re-read beautiful sentences, ones that make me weep, those that uplift my soul. (For example Late City by Robert Olen Butler, or America, America by Ethan Canin.)I read like I breathe.
One problem: “And then, kindly, tell me about them.” You tell ME about all the books so how can I tell YOU about the books?
I’ve been slowly chugging my way through it because, while I’ve seen many of the criticism and suspected that I would agree with them, I decided I wanted to know for myself, and yeah, my writer’s brain cannot shut up wanting to edit this. I mean, tossing aside all the super predictable tropes, the actual writing skill is *objectively* bad. The dialogue is extremely clunky, there is so much awkward, unnecessary exposition, and I swear this book would be half the length if every bit of repeated information was removed.
That being said, I couldn’t help but think of a premise that, to me, would be FAR more interesting but still stay within the same ballpark:
Instead of being the daughter of a military officer, I’d make Violet the daughter of a politician. We don’t have a college, we have a military boot camp, with both volunteers and conscripts (none of this “forcing children of enemies” nonsense though, that makes no sense). War has been going on for centuries, just like in the original, and up until now conscripts have only come from the lower class. However, things are getting desperate. Because the lower class has always been conscripted at peak physical age (early 20s), fewer and fewer of them have lived to have kids, so now the law has changed and they’re conscripting from the upper class. Violet doesn’t find out about this until she gets notified she’s been conscripted – I’d say her mother would be the one to deliver the news, being a politician. Violet protests, asks her mother if there’s anything that can be done, but the law is the law. THIS is why Violet is so physically unprepared – her privilege – not due to a disability (not trying to take away disability rep, but for this rewrite, I want Violet to have more of an internal flaw to overcome, and not have an external difficulty that’s gonna have us feeling *too* sorry for her. Where I’m going with this doesn’t work if she’s disabled, just trust me).
Anyways, the military has two paths: Frontline footsoldiers or dragon riders. Just like in the original, the chances of being chosen as a rider are slim, and training is dangerous (none of the whole ‘weeding out the weak’ by killing them either; there might be the occasional sadist cadet, but it’s not the norm). So, cadets can either volunteer to go right to the front line, or stay and train to maybe become a rider, knowing if they fail (and don’t die in the process, because despite my aforementioned change, it’s still dangerous and accidents can happen) they will be sent to the front line as a footsoldier. Violet initially plans to take the footsoldier route, certain there’s no way she can become a rider, when her mother warns her not to, revealing a disturbing secret: footsoldiers only get a few weeks of training before being sent to war. They just don’t have the time or resources to do otherwise. So while rider training will be tough, and yeah, the odds are against her, it still takes several months, she’ll have more time, and *maybe* have a chance, whereas if she goes off as a footsoldier, she’s dead for sure.
So she gets to boot camp, signs up for rider training, and definitely has a “Woe is me/this is so unfair” mentality – she’s not a *bad* person, just very privileged and sheltered. She’s gotta have a good heart otherwise we aren’t gonna be rooting for her. However, her privilege is what causes the tension with other cadets. She notices how most of them are in great shape, how they “just don’t understand” how hard this will be for her, but they call her out because *of coirse* they’re in shape, they’re prepared, because they’ve known since they could walk this would be their fate. She’s had it so easy, her weak muscles and soft hands are a sign of that, so most of the other cadets don’t have a lot of sympathy for her, but she does manage to make a couple friends. We can even still have Xadan and a sort-of enemies to lovers thing, but I’d rewrite that a lot too. I don’t think I’d have him wanting to kill her or hating her guts or anything, but he’d have little patience with her initially (probably still have it be that he’s lost family to the war before). I’d also probably make this 3rd person and alternate perspectives, just flesh out the characters a lot more all around.
Violet’s got the external struggle of needing to get stronger, but she *also* now has the character flaws she needs to overcome. She has to change her mentality, understanding that she’s *not* special, that her status as a politician’s kid isn’t going to get her any favors here (there’d have to be at least a couple others who are also upper class kids, they’d probably bond a bit, idk that’s more detail than I’m going to consider right now). Sorry I’m just tired of the “Weak but actually Super Special, she just needed to realize it” trope. I’d rather have the reverse, someone who thinks they’re inherently special but then has to learn the value of hard work and *earning* it. She gets chosen by a dragon, of course (A dragon, not two, lordy) because while yes, by that point she will have improved physically to a degree, it’s the growth of who she is as a *person* that impresses the dragon.
Obviously there’d be a lot more changes needed (and I still havent finished the book, so this is more just an outlime/overall premise change), but I wanted to share this little brainstorming that I did, be curious what you think of the idea.
I got an hour or two into the audiobook before rolling my eyes and quitting. She lost me when it became clear that the “dark, brooding bad boy hottie vs. chiseled, protective best friend hottie” love triangle would be the whole point of the book.
Couldn’t agree more. Fourth Wing is awful and unreadable if you understand what good storytelling is. Read books that no publisher would take…
There’s a self published book, Blinded by C. Lukas, that has a brilliant subplot about women going absolutely crazy for an awful book just like what’s happened with the Fourth Wing series. It’s hilarious yet sad. There’s also some great satire about publishers, and celebrity bookclubs.
Go check out Reddit and read about the women whose libido was dead until they read this book and were surprised by its re-awakening, who have found the confidence to communicate desires that were previously unknown to them.To say it hasn’t changed anyone’s trajectory is to share a complete ignorance to the massively joyful difference these books have made to many women’s relationship with their own bodies and their partners.
I am a 75 year old woman. I unequivocally loved The Fourth Wing and The Iron Flame. If you are my age and remember the books of Kathleen Woodiwiss and the early books of Rosemary Roger, these are definitely for you. I read the trilogy by J.R.R.Tolkien and was moved by the heroism. I read Kathleen Woodiwiss and was moved by the romance, daresay smut, as some critics called it. And I as not a smut for smut’s sake kind of woman. I found Fifty Shades of Grey rather insulting to the spirit of true romance. Yarros’s books combine the other worldly with the unattainable love. These worlds do not exist, neither do these men. But ohhh, if only they did. So I eagerly await Book 3 to see what happens to our snarky and lovable dragons, and our incredibly beautiful soon-to- be torn apart lovers. I like pretending I’m eighteen years old again. BTW, my daughter’s name is Heather. Only some of you will understand.