I Read Fourth Wing on a Delayed Flight and Lost My Mind

Twenty years old, small, and told to go die at dragon school

Here’s the setup. Violet Sorrengail is supposed to be a scribe. She’s got a body that breaks easily (Yarros has written openly about her own connective tissue disorder, and it shows in a good way), and her whole plan was quiet libraries and dusty archives. Then her mother, a general who is roughly as warm as a filing cabinet, orders her into the Riders Quadrant instead. Which means: cross a parapet in the wind with a decent chance of falling to your death, survive classmates who are actively allowed to murder you, and then, if you live, get chosen by a dragon that could incinerate you for fun.

So it’s a death-game school story. Hunger Games with wings, Divced-into-factions energy, a little bit of every YA-adjacent thing you loved in 2013. That is not a criticism, exactly. It’s a recipe, and Yarros knows the recipe cold.

The wrinkle that gives it teeth: Xaden Riorson. His father led a rebellion. Violet’s mother executed his father. He is now a wingleader, he is beautiful and furious, and he has every reason on earth to want her dead. The whole first act runs on that current. She should not trust him. She cannot stop watching him. You know exactly where it’s going and you go there anyway, gladly, at high speed.

The seams are right there, and I did not care, and that bothers me

Let me be honest about the writing, because I promised myself I’d be honest. The prose is functional. It’s clean, it’s fast, it repeats itself (I could have gone the rest of my life without being reminded quite so often that Violet is physically fragile), and there are anachronistic word choices that yank you out of the fantasy world for a second. People “shrug.” Somebody’s snark feels lifted straight off the internet. This is a book that was clearly built to be readable at speed on a phone at 1am, and it succeeds so completely at that goal that critiquing the sentence-level craft feels almost beside the point. Almost.

The worldbuilding is also thinner than it wants you to think. The magic system, the “signets,” the geography, the war on the border with the venin and the wyvern: it’s all sketched fast and it mostly holds together as long as you don’t push. I pushed. It wobbles. There’s a late reveal about what’s really happening at the border that is genuinely great and reframes the whole series, but getting there requires a fair bit of “sure, okay, I’ll allow it.”

And yet. Here’s the thing I have to reckon with. I read the parapet crossing scene (the one where a character she cares about does not make it) standing up in my kitchen because I’d stopped being able to sit down. I read the sparring-mat sequences with my whole body tense. When Tairn, the enormous ancient dragon, bonds with Violet against all odds and starts talking to her in that dry, contemptuous, weirdly loving voice, I laughed out loud on public transit. The dragons are the best characters in the book, full stop. Tairn and Andarna do more emotional work than half the humans.

The spice: yes, it earns the dark-romance shelf, particularly one much-discussed scene later in the book that BookTok has annotated to death. It’s genuinely steamy, it’s consensual and enthusiastic (worth saying plainly, since “morally gray hero who threatens the heroine” can go to ugly places and this one, refreshingly, does not; the threat and the desire stay on separate tracks and the actual romance is built on Xaden choosing to protect her). If dubious-consent is a hard line for you, you’re mostly safe here. The menace is texture, not the mechanism.

Small tangent. I keep seeing people call this book “just Hunger Games with dragons” as an insult, and I want to gently push back, because we said that about a lot of things and then quietly reread them four times. The comparison is fair. It’s also not the gotcha people think it is. Give me the archetype done with total conviction over a “subversive” book that’s ashamed of what it is. Yarros is not ashamed of anything, and that shamelessness is 80% of why it works.

My real criticism, the one that keeps this off a five: the back third gets baggy and info-dumpy right when it should be tightening, and Violet’s fragility is deployed inconsistently, sometimes life-threatening, sometimes forgotten entirely when the plot needs her to fight. And I do question my own taste here, genuinely, because a book this replicated and this algorithmically perfect should annoy me more than it does. It doesn’t. That’s either a point in its favor or a point against mine.

A book doesn’t have to be well made to be unputdownable, and I find that fact deeply inconvenient every single time it happens to me.

About Rebecca Yarros

Yarros was not an overnight thing, which people forget. She’d written a whole pile of contemporary romance and military-adjacent love stories (she’s a military spouse, and it bleeds into how she writes duty, sacrifice, and men who leave) for years before dragons made her a household name. She writes fast, she writes emotional, and she’s been candid about her chronic illness, which is exactly why Violet’s body reads as lived-in rather than as a gimmick. She built a career in the trenches of a genre that gets condescended to, then wrote the book that dragged half the internet into that genre with her. Respect where it’s due.

If this wrecked you, read these next

• A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas. The obvious next hit and the clear ancestor: fae, escalating spice, a heroine who levels up. If Fourth Wing was your gateway, this is the main road.
• From Blood and Ash by Jennifer L. Armentrout. Forbidden guard-and-charge romance, big reveals, quippy narration. Same “I’ll finish this at 3am” energy.
• The Bridge Kingdom by Danielle L. Jensen. Enemies-to-lovers with a spy heroine and actual political stakes, if you want the romance but slightly firmer worldbuilding scaffolding.

And if you just want more dragons and more Xaden, the sequel Iron Flame is right there, and I will not be held responsible for your weekend. Grab Fourth Wing on Amazon if you somehow don’t already own it.

For your book club

1. Xaden threatens Violet early and protects her constantly later. Where’s the line between “morally gray” and “red flag,” and did the book stay on the right side of it for you?
2. Violet’s physical fragility is central to her character. Did it read as meaningful representation, a plot device, or both, and did the book use it consistently?
3. The Hunger Games and ACOTAR comparisons come up constantly. Does leaning on familiar archetypes make a book lazy, or is execution the only thing that matters?
4. The dragons often carry more personality than the human cast. Why do you think that landed, and what does it say about what we actually want from these stories?
5. The late border reveal reframes everything. Did it feel earned and set up, or did it feel like a twist reached for after the fact?

Anyway. I told myself I’d read one chapter to see what the fuss was about, and the fuss turned out to be correct, and now there’s a dragon-shaped hole in my reading schedule for the foreseeable future…