I Have Opinions About Xaden Riorson and Six Islands

Two books, one bruise: where the story goes after Fourth Wing

If you haven’t read Fourth Wing, close this tab, go read it, come back. I’ll wait. For everyone else: Iron Flame picks up right after Violet Sorrengail finds out that basically everything she thought she knew about her world is a curated lie, and that Xaden, her broody rebel-son dragon rider boyfriend, has been keeping enormous secrets. Book two is Violet at Basgiath with the knives fully out, trust shredded, a horrifying new vice-commandant running the war college like a torture experiment, and a slow, grinding reveal of what’s actually happening at the wards. Onyx Storm then blows the map wide open: Violet and company sail off across the sea to unfamiliar kingdoms, chasing allies and answers while the thing at the border gets worse.

Yarros writes momentum. That’s the honest engine of these books. Even when I was annoyed, I kept turning pages.

What genuinely works, what genuinely doesn’t, and my Xaden problem

Let me start with the criticism, because I love this series enough to be mean to it. Iron Flame has a middle-book sag that is real, not fandom slander. The first third is Violet and Xaden trapped in a communication breakdown that goes on about a hundred pages too long, and I understand the trust was broken, I understand that’s the point, but there’s a stretch where I wanted to reach into the book and go, use your words, both of you, please. It tightens hard in the back half. The interrogation-scene tension, the venin reveal, the sheer horror of what’s been hidden: that lands. But you earn it by wading.

Onyx Storm has a different flaw, and it’s the one that made the fandom feral. It’s a quest book. Six islands, sort of a tour, and some of those stops feel like side missions in a video game where you know the plot-relevant one is coming but you have to clear the others first. There’s padding. There’s a cliffhanger at the end so aggressive I actually said a bad word out loud on my back porch, alone, at 11pm, like a lunatic. And here’s my real gripe: three books in, I’m starting to feel the shape of a series being stretched to five, and I don’t fully trust that every book needs to be this long.

Now the good, and it’s a lot. The dragons are the best characters. Tairn and Andarna and Sgaeyl have more personality in a single sarcastic line than half the human cast, and Yarros knows it. The banter is genuinely funny. And Xaden, look, I question my own taste here constantly, because he’s a walking dark-romance cliche (guarded, deadly, will burn the world for her, communicates his love primarily through withholding information and then brooding about it) and I fell for it completely anyway. That’s the trick of this genre and Yarros runs the play clean. When it works on you, you don’t care that you can see the strings.

On the spice: it earns its reputation. These are steamy, explicit, unapologetic, and the intimacy actually functions as plot and character rather than decoration. Content-wise I’d flag it for the war-college brutality, on-page death of people you like, and Xaden’s whole protective-deception thing, which some readers read as swoony and others read as controlling. Both readings are fair. I hold both in my head at once and keep reading, which is maybe the most honest thing I can tell you about myself.

Tangent, bear with me: I read most of Onyx Storm in a single Saturday during a power outage, on my phone, at like 4 percent for the last two chapters, silently begging the battery to hold. And I think that’s the truest review I can give. A “better” written book would not have kept me hostage to a dying phone. This one did.

You don’t read Empyrean for the prose. You read it because Yarros understands, at a cellular level, exactly how long to make you wait before she gives you the thing you want.

About Rebecca Yarros

Yarros is not an overnight thing, which people forget. She wrote contemporary romance and emotional military-family fiction for years (The Things We Leave Unfinished is genuinely lovely and will wreck you in a completely different key) before Fourth Wing turned her into a phenomenon. She’s a military spouse and a mom to a big family, several adopted, and that lived experience shows up in how she writes found family, sacrifice, and people who love each other under pressure. She’s also open about writing with chronic illness, which is why Violet’s EDS-coded disability feels lived-in rather than researched. She knows what she’s doing. The “she just got lucky” take is lazy.

If this wrecked you, read these next

• A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas. The romantasy blueprint, the book that taught this whole genre how to do the swoony-partner-with-secrets thing at scale.
• Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros. Obviously. If you somehow read this review out of order, start the series properly.
• From Blood and Ash by Jennifer L. Armentrout. Similar heat, similar bite, a heroine discovering her world is a lie, and a hero who is a whole lot.
• The Serpent and the Wings of Night by Carissa Broadbent. Deadly tournament, slow burn, gorgeous and mean in the best way.

You can grab Iron Flame and Onyx Storm here if you want to make the same questionable Saturday choices I did.

For your book club

1. Xaden withholds information to protect Violet. Is that love, control, or both, and does the book let you decide, or does it push you toward one reading?
2. Iron Flame is often called a slow middle book. Did the drawn-out breakdown of trust feel earned to you, or overextended?
3. Onyx Storm opens the world beyond Navarre. Did leaving Basgiath strengthen the series or dilute what made it addictive?
4. Violet’s disability is central to who she is without being her whole story. How does Yarros handle that, and does it change how you read heroism in fantasy?
5. These books are wildly commercial and wildly beloved and also genuinely criticized. What does that split tell us about what “good” means in genre fiction?

Anyway. Book four. I’m not okay about the wait and neither are you…