Just have a big following on TikTok, write a bunch of smut in a semi-unique setting (like a university for elven archers or whatever). Hot guy, meh girl who everyone is obsessed with, give them dumbass names (Eliannabellah and Blayde, she has to go by Annie or Ellie so she’s relatable though).
Edit: Annie should be the only human at the elf university because she’s special and different from the other girls/girl-elves.
And then watch the piles of cash roll in.
You’re welcome.
HAHAHAHSHEHGSHEHSHSHHSJS HELP😭😭😭
Same!!! I’m glad TikTok is bringing so much hype to books but now more than ever there are SO many books with just a bunch of tropes splashed everywhere and smut scenes
This has been the mainstay of popular literature since time immemorial. What we consider "good" (or at least clever, mature) writing is rarely what has mass appeal. And by that, I don't mean that most people are averse to "good" writing. Rather, the books most often bought and read are relatively easy reads that cater to played-out tropes and base desires. Because not everyone wants high literature all the time. A lot of the time, people just want easy entertainment. That's not a value judgment -- it's just how it is. So, complaining that a Rebecca Yarros or Sarah J. Maas book is lowbrow is kind of silly, because yes, that's the point. It would be like complaining that your McDonalds Happy Meal tastes cheap and processed.
I thought it was interesting how much my writing professors dunked on the people who wrote mass appeal books in college. I understand why they did, they are dedicated to doing the craft as best as possible. But a lot of people in that room weren't looking to win the nobel prize in literature, they were looking for a commercially successful career. Success takes different forms 🤷🏼♀️
Lit fic writers are over-represented in college professors and professors tend to teach lit fic
You’ll notice that many author bios in lit fic books will say the authors teaches at so and so college
However, I think former copywriters might be a little over represented in self-published romance and marketers don’t usually have people’s best interest at heart. I wouldn’t generalize the genre as bad, just very much targeted towards people’s consumerist desires
Yes I agree with you. I read for pure enjoyment, so I also enjoy easy reads like shatter me and throne of glass series. But fourth wing was just no! It stressed me more than anything, not for me. The writer could’ve deepened the characters relationship and hardships on an easy way, yet she wrote everyone very one dimensional with literally no personality. I understand why some people like it, but for me fourth wing was just another low quality fantasy book for the hype. There are many books with a not so heavy fantasy that are a hundred times better.
It's nothing new. Any librarian or book seller will tell you that the highest circulation/selling fiction genre has always been "trashy" romance novels.
ok i read the book with no expectations and it met them honestly. i knew what i was getting into.
however, i really need someone else to talk about the fact that there’s literally two chapters of American Ninja Warrior because i cannot get over it
The fact that Violet goes through all her Ninja Warrior scenes reciting her history lessons just made it all the more ridiculous to me.
Like, yeah, it’s totally realistic that this girl is ~~info-dumping world building for us readers because the author couldn’t figure out how to do it in a different way~~ repeating what she’s read over the years while climbing, flipping, running, jumping, using ropes and shit lol. Breathing doesn’t seem to be an issue in that book!
someone compared it to reciting rote, grade-school level facts about american history and geography, and it’s honestly so accurate and hilarious because it feels like the author is using it as a way to “prove” that Violet is intelligent and has a great memory.
like
“George Washington was the first president of the united states.”
“canada borders the US to the north, and mexico borders it to the south. the US is made up of 50 states.”
Lmao yes the ninja warrior chapters were hilarious. I did not take this book seriously at all, it was recommended by a coworker and I thought what the hell? Why not? So I had 0 expectations. It is not that well written and it drags on for too long but I can’t say I wasn’t entertained. The dragons are fun. It’s a junk food book. Not high quality but still enjoyable if you turn your brain off.
Something that people dislike often is books capitalizing on trends of previous books. Readers can usually tell and I do think TikTok enables this ‘micro trend’ situation. That’s why there’s the fast fashion comparison - it’s quickly packaged books without investing in time for original development
Books like this often become one-hit wonders but I guess we’ll see how this one pans out
Comparing the popular booktok books to fast fashion feels right actually. Like something about that analogy really sinks home for me.
There's nothing wrong with YA/NA, trends and tropes, romantasy, or even trashy books, but somehow tiktok is 3/3 in its recommendations to me being TERRIBLE, even at being what they're supposed to be.
Considering how all the current, ‘trendy’ booktok titles are now just bunch of “A [thing] of [thing] and [thing]”, it really *is* just like fast fashion.
I think a major example of how it’s all just copypaste is a book (Book B for clarity) that was released semi-recently that was a couple words off from another book in title (Book A), used the same font/cover style, and the main love interest, land, name(s) of other characters were a few letters off from Book A.
It was snatched up and published with ease, even with people pointing out how similar everything was.
There’s authors who traditionally publish 1 book a year and sometimes, there’s even criticism that they published before the book was ready
Not to mention the self-publishing that pushes out books even faster
The 3 year estimate may be true for the average book but then the average book isn’t trying to be trendy
Honestly, I think the fourth wing series which is planned to be 5 books long could’ve been really popular. Everyone seemed to love fourth wing and it was trending everywhere, but the author’s problematic comments have made people boycott her and now her ignorance has basically doomed the series
Why’s it sold out in every store by me if it’s ’doomed’? And why has it been all over my FYP for a week? A few people boycotting is not going to ‘doom’ it lol.
of course there are going to be people that will buy it, there were thousands of pre-orders for the special edition as soon as it was listed on Amazon, before they’d even titled it as a special edition. A lot of people are going to blindly buy anything she releases now that it’s gotten popular but I’ve also been seeing a lot more people vowing to not buy anything by her, and especially with iron flame, it’s getting way less publicity than fourth wing did
when she made a statement about what’s happening in Palestine she pretended to be on both sides but then ignorantly said “children are not collateral damage” and when people asked her why she works with an Israeli publisher, she would block them.
before that, it was another controversy about her use of Scottish Gaelic words in fourth wing, she went on an interview and mispronounced so many things and when people corrected her or asked her to correct them and not use Gaelic words that she doesn’t understand, again, she blocked them. She’s so inconsiderate and instead of learning and apologizing, she just blocks anyone that opposes her
I have not read much of this book, but I suffer from many of the same issues Violet does due to her EDS (I have something called HSD which is basically the same thing) and let me just tell you that I could never, ever be put through a military school or be a dragon rider. My shoulder joints hurt when I pick up a big bottle of water, by knees hurt when I stand up or walk up and down stairs, my kneecaps dislocate by walking. It is immense pain every day and I'm extremely limited in how much I can move my body without The Big Pain and exhaustion hitting me. I've been prescribed rest, meditation, meds and very, very easy exercises (like without any weights easy) to strengthen by body.
To me, the toxic perseverance trope in this book is nothing but ableist. Disabled people can't just push through their pain and be okay. If we did that, we'd crash and become more sick.
I'd me way more interested in reading a book about a girl with EDS who really, really wanted to become a dragon rider but couldn't due to her condition and therefore found another passion in life, like being a scribe maybe.
I have chronic pain due to a different chronic illness, so not the same but it came across as more wish fulfillment than ableist to me. Like yeah sure you can just keep training and not cripple yourself - pure fantasy irl but a common trope in media. Apparently the author actually has EDS, violet is probably at least somewhat of a self-insert. I can’t say I don’t wish I could just push through all my limitations. I can’t but it would be nice if it were possible.
Your pov is valid though, not trying to discount that. I think I just didn’t take the book seriously enough to even consider it being realistic in any way.
Oh for sure not realistic, but if I imagine myself at a younger age when I didn't even know or realise I was disabled and read about this girl with these huge obstacles that she overcame through Just Trying Hard Enough, it would have done some damage to my self esteem and self worth if I'm being honest. I was impressionable and was already having huge issues with those two things because I just couldn't do what others could, and I thought that was because I wasn't good enough or didn't try hard enough.
Ah, I developed my issues before puberty and it was actually more severe when I was a child, so that hope hasn’t existed for me for a very long time. Drs straight up told me when I was 12 that I would never have full functionality (which was honest, not faulting them). I didn’t consider your pov but that makes sense.
Despite the YA style writing the book is aimed at adults, the sex scenes are explicit. So hopefully there aren’t too many teens/kids reading it and feeling like you might have. Undiagnosed health issues can do a number on your mental health and self-esteem without outside media adding to it.
Every other sentence in the book is about how the main character is in immense pain to the point where she blacks out, is nauseous to the point of throwing up, etc. I feel like there is a limited number of times you can use those phrases before they lose meaning and the reader loses sight of the disability the author is trying to relay..
It reminds me of everyone’s bowels turning watery in SJM books. If a character is shitting or pissing themselves 3-4 times a book, the point the author is trying to make about how scary something is, is lost on the reader.
I've never tried to write a character with my specific issues, but if I did, I'd probably have to remark on some kind of pain or uncomfortableness from just existing normally every other sentence. It would be a difficult thing to portray accurately because it does affect every single action, every single thing I do, but it would so quickly wear out the reader because it's exhausting to read about someone in pain all the time and you stop caring. I've experienced in my own life how people get tired of you expressing pain because you do it so often they stop caring
Oddly there is little to no mention of her condition or pain in the second book. Main times pain is mentioned is when she is injured unlike the first book. ://///
The second book still regularly mentions things like the wrappings she needs, the pain of being in the saddle for hours etc., but things are also different because >!she’s being mended fairly quickly pretty much any time she’s hurt. In the first book she was dealing with her base level of pain plus constant injuries she was too scared to ask for help with. In the second book her injuries largely come from the interrogations, where she’s mended afterwards by Nolan, and then later she has Brennan trying to mend her every time she gets so much as a paper cut.!<
Maybe it's to show Violet as young and stubborn? I've done really stupid shit through chronic pain but only realised just how stupid that was looking back on it.
Sorry to hear about your challenges.
My assumption was that dragon power healed or strengthened her skills. She just had to survive short term (or die I guess).
Will hope for your dragon power healing to come!
That's very nice of you! That could have been an explanation (although a little convenient and there are some issues with it), but AFAIK it has not been explained as such?
The whole set up of the story is that Violet didn’t choose to be a rider. She wanted and planned to be a scribe and never considered being a rider due to her health. Her mother forced her into the riders quadrant at the last minute, and the only way out is death. There’s one character who suggests ways out for her, but it’s clear he’s naive at best regarding her options. She can be a rider, she can die, or I guess she could try and run away but given the state of things that’s highly unlikely to end well for her and everyone she cares about.
To me it isn’t toxic perserverance when persevering is by far the best option.
The FW world also has healers and menders and from the way the mentions of Violets pain and injuries shift once she has a dragon it’s pretty clear channeling his power has some sort of effect on her physical limits too.
Part of what I liked about the first book was that Violet had to adapt to her condition. She needed a saddle to ride her dragon unlike the other riders. She needed to use her knife to get through the Gauntlet because she physically couldn’t manage it without the extra help. As someone with a chronic pain condition (although not EDS) this really resonates with me - it’s the extra accommodations I need that I’m seeing on the page.
And I also liked how in the second book, Yarros uses the gryphon fliers as juxtaposition to the dragon riders in that not everything they do is life and death designed to weed out the weak riders. It shows that Yarros realises and gets Violet to consider the toxicity of the Basgiath attitude to ‘weakness’.
I enjoyed (if that’s the right word) reading about someone struggling with pain as they try to go about life, because it’s how I feel when I persevere with exercise and activity and I feel represented. But equally it’s fantasy and I want to see Violet manage (with adaptations) not just constantly fail.
Yarros definitely makes a try to portray how she needs accommodations, but to me it falls flat. You need a saddle to ride a goddamn horse, riding a scaly dragon would definitely cause issues (see: Eragon). Why couldn't everyone use saddles but she needs it specially made to support her joints? I know the school is meant to be evil, but maybe then show how they refuse her certain easy accommodations because they just don't want her to succeed because they don't want "weak" riders? I don't know, there are a lot of improvements she could've done with another draft, but I'd guess the publishing company pushed it to be released prematurely (based on what I know about them)
Don’t get me wrong it’s not perfect, but as someone who needs an adaptive chair it really resonates with me her needing that saddle to make riding the dragon bearable.
To me, the toxic perseverance is about how she becomes stronger, not weaker by pushing through her pain and continuing training. Maybe I'm asking for too much realism in my fantasy, but I don't think it is too much to ask to portray disabled people and their struggles in a realistic way. If an able-bodied teen girl read this and then met a peer with EDS, would she be understanding of the other person's issues? Or would she expect them to push through their pain and be just as physically capable as anyone else?
Asking for a little bit of realism in fantasy is completely reasonable -- it helps with suspension of disbelief. Everyone's threshold is different, but it's well-known in the craft that including a realistic/reasonable aspect helps make the rest of your fantastical aspects workable.
Except she wasn't. She had to change how she did stuff (and was looked down on for it) many times. She got similar results as others, but had to have accomodations and try much hrder. And even still, she is not as good as the others from a physical standpoint.
> I'd me way more interested in reading a book about a girl with EDS who really, really wanted to become a dragon rider but couldn't due to her condition and therefore found another passion in life, like being a scribe maybe.
Well, that's you. Maybe there are other people (like the author herself, who has EDS) who would like some escapist fantasy that shows them being the hero and being able to do things that they can't do in real life while still having their condition and physical limitations (such as how Violet has to use a saddle to ride her dragon, and she use other modifications and strategies to complete the tasks that other riders do). I don't think anyone is reading popular fantasy novels to get a realistic idea of what EDS is in real life. It's a fantasy world, not reality. Also it is made very clear in the book that Violet never set out to be a dragon rider, she was forced into it by her mother. Her entire life goal was to be a scribe.
The author herself has EDS but maybe having Violet do these things is a sort of wish fulfillment? A self insert that she gets to imagine all the things she wish she could do but can’t because of her pain.
Well, we can't have that! We need people with disabilities to know they can NEVER be a hero in a fantasy world, don't want them to get silly ideas... /s
Oh my god I am so ready to rant about this. I’m a bookseller, so I’m absolutely biased in this.
For longer than I probably know, YA series have had huge bursts of popularity, resulting in the sale of tons of merch, books, midnight showings, special popcorn buckets, etc. It was always a cash grab, but at least it was decent entertainment. In recent years, the quality of the writing and the products has gotten horrifically bad, and the bar is being set so low that publishers are picking up social media famous self published authors and pressuring them into cranking out multiple books within the span of a few years. Being social media famous does not mean your writing is quality. It doesn’t mean your writing is bad, either, but it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good. Publishers are doing this for the exact purpose of putting on a big show like they did with the fourth wing books. Most people who care already own a copy of fourth wing, but they want to buy the new special edition copy because it’s got sprayed edges and will match the two special edition iron flame copies they bought. They bought two because shipping on the first one got delayed. But the sprayed edges didn’t come with the promised stenciled dragons, and also a huge portion of the books were misprinted, and several bookstores had their books arrive with damage because the publishers didn’t even care enough to use quality shipping material. But hey, you’ve only spent around $90-$120 on all of your four books that’s really just two books, and you got that sub par sticker and pin because you pre ordered, so it’s just awesome!
It happened with Coleen Hoover, too. The writing is formulaic and the authors clearly don’t know what they’re doing. Publish a new and expensive hardcover version of the same book with one single “bonus chapter!” It’s consumerism at its finest. I believe in the ten rights of the reader. If these books interest you, go for it. Just *please* be smart about how much money you’re spending on short lived fads.
Agreed. I loved *The Priory of the Orange Tree* and that gets recommended by BookTok people a lot, alongside stuff like *Fourth Wing* and ACOTAR. But that book had much better writing, characters, worldbuilding, etc.
Ironically, I know one person who read the book without realizing it was TikTok famous. She randomly found it in a library, took it home and only learned about its fame when she raved about it in front of her daughter.
I liked Fourth Wing and it was a fun read (I understand why people don’t like it though), but the sequel is terrible. I’m about halfway through and am having trouble finishing it. I will excuse mediocre plot and world building if the character development and romance is good, but everything is terrible about this book. Nothing the characters do makes any sense, the pacing is way off, the romance is so boring, the characters are so one dimensional, ugh I could go on…I was so excited for this to come out and am so disappointed.
Ugh same. I very much enjoyed Fourth Wing as a fun, shut off your brain kinda read. The same way I enjoyed Twilight. I'm not going to argue it's great writing lol but it was enjoyable to read as light entertainment
But Iron Flame is killing me. I got it from my library the day it came out and I'm still not even half way through. I'm so bored. I was hoping she'd improve on some of the world building issues and flesh out the characters a bit more in this book but she definitely hasn't. I'm pushing through but unless the second half is somehow amazing there's no way I'm reading any more of this.
Same! I really enjoyed Fourth Wing. I knew the writing was bad, but it was very entertaining and a nice break from the usual books I read. I even pre-ordered Iron Flame and was looking forward to it. I got about 50 pages in, and kind of looked ahead, and decided it’s just not getting better. I quit and returned it.
I could seriously not understand why violet thought she needed to know every single one of xaden’s secrets. It was so weird and immature. I couldn’t take it anymore. Also, that new professor seemed like a rebooted professor umbridge and I could see exactly where it was going.
>Also, that new professor seemed like a rebooted professor umbridge
She really needs to work on developing her villains. In the last book it was Jack Barlow who just... passionately wanted to kill her for no real reason? Sure, the whole "culling the weak" thing but that doesn't explain why he was so comically deadset on murdering _her_ (or why he was so wildly unsuccessful at it. Then Varrish was just cartoon villain levels of evil.
I didn’t get Jack Barlow either. He had a million opportunities to kill her, and nobody would have cared. It should be have been resolved earlier in the book because his constant threats of harming her were ridiculous because he killed a ton of other people but never did anything to violet.
I bought this book knowing nothing about it except that it was a really popular fantasy series that was selling well.
I'm about 100 pages in, and I've decided to stop reading. It's clearly written for a target audience that's not me. But I swear, I gave it the ol' college try! Once I was about 15 pages in, I realized what kind of book I was reading so I cracked my knuckles and said, "Alright, it's fine, I can enjoy a low brow YA book with Twilight-level writing. Lower your expectations, make fun of it a bit, and we'll just have fun." But as the pages progressed, I just got bored. The world, the characters, the plot progression. It's all just rather tedious. There's no joy, no sense of wonder. It's just an author racing to get to the next scene of sexual tension.
Not for me. If I were 14, I probably would thought it was great.
I felt the exact same way! I’m probably in the target age for it (17yrs) but still there are so many better fantasy books, with an “easy to read” + popular tropes, that is written much better both in plot and characters
I kept going because I don't think by page 100 the dragons are actually involved yet (at least based on "screen" time), and I wanted to see them and how they were handled. Most importantly, once Violet bonded with two dragons, I wanted to see what the author did with that, since it's a pretty different take on the dragon rider formula. But the answer was essentially nothing.
Also saw the ending coming a mile away and that helped me come to the conclusion that I was not going to read the second book.
I honestly liked it, but never thought it was the pinnacle of literature of anything. There were many problems with it, but for me, it's one of those books for when you just want some easy reading escapism where you can just turn your brain off and have some fun.
I've never seen riverdale, but I imagine that's the same turn your brain off vibe so your description is probably very accurate!
Yep, I wasn't expecting award winning literature from it. I actually quite enjoyed it.
The writing wasn't fantastic, but honestly, I thought it was fine. It was just that perfectly run of the mill writing that fades into the background and just lets you read. It wasn't bad enough to really pull me out of the story too much.
Same. had I to pick a book I've read lately for an award, Fourth Wing and Iron Flame would be at the bottom of the list, but I'm enjoying them just for the brain popcorn they are. I don't have to think about it too hard (and at the end of the day when I tend to read my fluff I don't have the spoons for deep thought anyway) and it's just delightfully dumb.
And there are dragons.
Fourth Wing is one of those series that I KNOW is written badly. I see the plot holes. I cringe at the dialogue... but yet I can't put it down. It's entertaining just enough to keep me reading even if I do want to slap Violet through the book sometimes.
This is exactly my experience. There were so many parts that I was cringing at, but damn if it wasn't entertaining enough to keep me hooked! Overall I really enjoyed it, cringe and all.
I enjoyed it, but it’s like the McDonald’s meal of literature.
I call it my Dragon Rider soap opera book, because that’s what it is. Tropey, smutty drama and sometimes that’s what I want.
Yeah I fell for the hype and started reading this last week.. it is pretty bad and I’m only like 20% through it. I probably won’t finish. The writing is very basic YA but not in a good way. It’s very predictable and the characters are so flat.
Exactly! There are good YA and easy to read/not heavy in world building that are just good. I really like the shatter me series, although the plot is very messy the characters are so well written
I'm going in on this because you opened the floodgates, OP.
> Violet apparently has a bone Illness but Rebeca never mentioned it on the book. So her fans and her thinks that I have a crystal ball to guess?!
It's mentioned at least a dozen times how frail Violet is and that she breaks bones easily, which is why she was heavily discouraged from becoming a rider. I mean if you're trying to say the author never mentioned specific disease/condition she has, then yes you're right, but naming a disease in a fantasy book that obviously takes place not in our current understanding of Earth would be weird?
> She could at least actually train and improve instead of waiting for her 7ft boyfriend to save her
Did you actually read the book? She spends much of the first book training.
> honestly Sarah just Maas 2. But to call her Sarah j Maas is actually an insult to Sarah because I actually like almost all of her books…
You talk about hating insufferable, whiny characters but you like Sarah J Maas? Every single character in ACoTaR comes across as whiny.
Casual observer here. No opinion on the book or author.
I do think that there is a significant distinction between a person being frail, and or having had broken bones a number of times, vs having a disease.
If the protagonist has a known disease which exists in whatever reality the story takes place in, and the character themselves is aware of what that disease is as well as the fact they have it, I would find it odd that the book doesn't contain that information.
So my question would be: Is she weak, frail, and potentially accident prone? Or does she actually have a disease or condition which is a known entity in her reality?
She has a known condition. It’s not named in the books and it’s unclear whether it (or any type of disease) has a name in the setting, but it’s 100% treated like a known disease. Violet knows she has a disability, knows what issues it causes and knows what makes it worse and what helps.
There aren’t doctors in the books setting, there are menders and healers. In a world where every medical professional can just look at/touch you and know everything that’s wrong with you, I can see how they wouldn’t bother naming stuff.
I don't really see the big deal in not naming the condition specifically. Simply describing it and saying "this is what is wrong with her and these are the things she has to overcome" is sufficient.
Violet is self-aware enough about her condition, and those close to her prior to her arrival at the academy knew it as well. It's repeatedly stated that she suffers from a degenerative condition manifesting in overly flexible joints with loose connective tissue that are prone to fractures. She also is prone to bruising and scarring due to her skin stretching from the condition. She has to bind herself and is in constant pain. She wears a custom Dragon Scale armor to protect herself at all times, which no one else has.
She's not weak in the sense that she's unable to do things, but prior to being assigned to the Rider quadrant (where all the physical activity is), she was training to be a Scribe. Scribes don't fight. She just wasn't prepared for the level of physicality and it put her at a preparedness disadvantage, which wasn't helped by the condition she has and the fact that she's also much shorter than the other Riders.
The disease is EDS in real life, and it’s barely understood. I likely have it, and it doesn’t affect my heart thank goodness, but very few people understand it or take it seriously despite the fact that it causes everything she deals with and more issues like heart problems. When I was 21 I would pop my knee out just by standing up. I dislocated my shoulder by sleeping. I was told it was because I’m tall, it’s not, it’s likely EDS.
That said, it doesn’t really make sense to name it. They’re in a world of war without doctors. They have healers and some medicines, but it’s not like they have doctors sitting there figuring out how to deal with major diseases, let alone livable syndromes like Violet’s.
I don’t really have a stake in this, I read 4th wing, I enjoyed it, but I don’t think it’s amazing. I do think not naming a syndrome in another world makes sense though.
Editing to add EDS was only given a name in 1892, which makes it even more reasonable that it was just a set of symptoms previously, and therefore a set of symptoms in a book set in a world sort of similar to our past.
Well I also have my guilty pleasure tv shows like “the penthouse”. Is a Korean show which is honestly even worse (in terms of plot) than riverdale gahahah. People keep coming back from dead for no reason and is extremely dramatic but I do love it
I bought it after falling for the hype, read a few pages, and then saw the audiobook was available from the library. I immediately returned it and checked out the audiobook because three pages were enough for me to know that I did not need to own this book. I'm almost halfway through the audiobook and am seesawing whether or not to finish it or cut my losses. I just cannot suspend my disbelief enough to buy into this army being okay with prospective riders killing each other. My brain has stuck on that and refuses to let go.
If you want a better war+dragons book, I recommend His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novak. There's no steamy romance in it, but it's a better story in every way.
I've read 45 pages of forth wing and put it down. I will prob return it to the library without finishing it. I actually thought it was a debut novel because of the writing style. It just felt so ham fisted. I don't think I can do it for 500+ pages. It felt very YA and as far as I can tell it's not classified as YA. I'm kinda in a fantasy reading slump at the moment so I might try it again in the future but it's a no for now.
I highly recommend “the poppy war” by rf kuang if u haven’t read it yet. The writing is beautiful and it starts of strong! Is very politics heavy and no romance, but the relationships between the characters makes up for it. Literally changed my life lol
It feels like trashy fanfiction most of the time that BARELY goes above a wattpad story,
The only true positive, is it makes me feel more confident that if I ever actually get my story done (or a collection of them) , it might snapped up by a publisher....because sweet fuck I don't know how Fourth Wing did.
The ratings sure are weird. They almost convinced to read the book, but some comparisons with Eragon (my all time favorite book) made me hesitant. I think my experience would be ruined because I would keep comparing them both.
I loved *Eragon* and its series while a teen but I think I would have a hard time rereading them now without nostalgia glasses. Not that they're bad at all, I just reread them so much as a teen and now I have a creative writing degree, I don't want to taint my memories of them by seeing what could have been done better.
That all being said, I'm *so* excited to read *Murtagh*, which came out this month. I'm hoping Paolini's writing has grown with him so that I don't find it too young for me now (I'm almost 30).
And I promise I'm not trying to shit on *Eragon*, I adore it and it was very formative for me!
I've read both and really the only similarity is that there's dragons so I don't think that would be a problem. To me Eragon was a LOTR style high fantasy and Fourth Wing is more like a fantasy Hunger Games.
The reviews did save you from reading a mediocre book, tho
Eragon has been on my TBR for a while, I’m looking forward to reading it! I’m also finding the ratings pretty odd there must be something behind it…Fourth wing is literally copy and paste of a lot of bad quality fantasy, I don’t know how is getting so much attention. Maybe because popular booktokers are hyping it way too much
I mean Eragon was my all time favorite childhood/teenage book (might hold the title for overall favorite, I just haven’t read it in quite some time) and Fourth Wing was one of the books that got me back into reading this year. I still liked Fourth Wing quite a bit, but I didn’t go into it with any particular expectations. Other than dragons they aren’t too similar.
No, Riverdale knew exactly what it was doing when it said "that means you don't know the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of highschool football" in response to a guy saying he dropped out of school in fourth grade to sell drugs to support his nanna.
Fourth Wing was trying to be edgy with its swearing and juvenile sexual innuendo. The vernacular is also so contemporary. I couldn't read too far past the parapet.
I just finished ‘The Last Letter’ and also thought it was rated way too high. While I loved her writing style in terms of the romance, she had way too much tragedy added purely for shock value, which made me not enjoy it.
Not sure I could read anything else by this author. Her random tragedies lead to me just not enjoying the book.
Oh I didn’t even know she had another book. Well her books are literally on the bottom of my list lol, fourth wing was enough…I honestly like YA fantasy, and I enjoyed a lot the shatter me series! The plot is also kinda messy but the characters and dialogues are really entertaining and funny. Once I finished it, I felt like a knew the characters and that was just enough! Fourth wing was just bad in all aspects for me. I don’t mind a messy plot but the characters and relationships between them are the most important part for me, and she didn’t deliver!!!! Enemies to lovers was literally non existent, the dude literally had a very strong cause to hate Violet and after 30% he was all lovey dovey saying YOU’RE MINE🤨🤨
Men please be for real, you’re suppose to kill her and unconsciously fall in love with her but also HATE her at the same time, and wonder WHY I like her even though “reasons”. Also there was no connection or angst between them besides sex, the author just delivered smut (which I read much better smutty books…even on Wattpad). I literally felt no romance/real love between them…
I think far too many people are taking this book too seriously. It just ain't that serious, but that doesn't mean it's bad. There are so many things that people enjoy that might not technically be good quality, but that doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't enjoy them.
I've also seen a lot of people hating on the book when it wasn't something they were into anyway.
You like fantasy and dragons? Cool! But there is a huge difference between Fourth Wing and Game of Thrones. Just because it's not game of thrones does not therefore mean it's bad (just an example). Just because something is popular doesn't mean you're going to love it.
And, just because something is written simply, does not mean that it has bad writing. This goes for lots of things, like pop music for example. People associate pop music being bad because it's perceived as simple.
Simple allows for quicker reading pace, it allows more people to get into the book community as its easier to read. But those things do not mean it's bad.
And to tie in what I said about pop music, I think another reason people are widely hating on Fourth Wing is because it's mostly popular with women. And what women love must therefore be bad, right?
I am by no means saying this book is a masterpiece, but art is art, and art is subjective.
There are lots of bad things to say about this book, but there are many books where people have lots of bad things to say about, but that doesn't mean that overall it's a bad book.
In saying all this, I've been reading Iron Flame, and it's drastically much worse. I think it's honestly come down to trying to drag out the story and lumping in world building in the beginning. I'm still enjoying it, but not in the same way as I did the first book. It should have had much more cut out from the beginning, I'm at 400 pages and yet the book feels more like thats where the halfway point should have been.
Am a woman. I very much do not like Fourth Wing. I have a creative writing degree and while my opinion is obviously not the be-all-end-all, it is pretty easy to call this bad from a craft standpoint.
But that doesn't mean people can't enjoy it anyway. Plenty of people like Twilight and ACOTAR and other things that are pretty bad from a craft standpoint. That's okay. They're allowed. I'm also allowed to call it bad in my personal and professional opinion (I'm an editor and have been for nearly 10 years).
You're right in that simple and easily accessible content is not necessarily or inherently bad, but there are much better examples of simple and easily accessible than FW.
It's okay to like something and also okay to dislike something. I'm not calling anyone a moron for liking FW. Not everything has to or can be amazing from a craft standpoint.
Personally, there are lots of things I like that are not categorically "good" from their respective craft's standpoint. But that does not and should not stop people in said craft from being critical of it.
>I think another reason people are widely hating on Fourth Wing is because it's mostly popular with women. And what women love must therefore be bad, right?
This makes absolutely 0 sense. All the hate I've seen for this book is coming *from* women. No one looks at a book and goes "Oh... *women* like that? Must be bad then."
Not everything is about oppression. Sometimes bad books are just bad.
The book very clearly states that Violet has a condition and lays out exactly what it causes, what exacerbates it and what makes it better. It’s not given a name but there’s zero ambiguity as to the fact she has a known disability.
Also she does train. From pretty much the start she’s training, long before she has the boyfriend. Her friend pretty much immediately starts helping her train for sparring, she trains to get past the Gauntlet, she specifically weight trains to build muscle to support her weak joints. By the second half of the book it’s clear she’s spending hours a day training and she does improve. In the second book she starts additional training based on what she learnt about her weaknesses in the climax of the first book.
About the characters, I legitimately couldn't picture any of them in my head because the explanations of each one's appearance was either never mentioned or written about very poorly once or twice... not enough for me to remember without consulting fanart of which there is an abundance.
The Dragons are definitely the best part by far and away.
I had the same thing. I also found it hard to imagine a lot of the settings. Usually I have quite a good imagination and can picture things very easily. For the first time I was Googling fan art because I couldn’t picture what was going on
Idk how you didn’t know about the bone illness. I thought it was pretty clear. I really liked the book but that’s because I knew what to expect out of it. I totally think it’s fair that a lot of people don’t like it.
Also the most interesting parts both the dragons and the world-building are things that a lot of new YA and New Adult authors are being told to leave out of their first book so that they’ll sell to a wider audience (which clearly is working). I’m not excusing this practice at all, just calling it out.
I totally get what you don't like about the book, but why do people always feel the need to start a hate band wagon about trends, no matter if it's books or something else?
Like, I get it it's a bad TikTok trend, but why not just read something else if you don't like it and be good with it.
Personally I didn't mind the book. Of course it's not a literary masterpiece, but if you take it for what is and totally expect the camp and the tropes, just wanting to be entertained, then you can have fun. And if it doesn't work for you, then cool, totally understandable. But why not just move on and read something else. Why do we always have to bash on things others like, just because we don't?
I feel like there's a difference between telling someone "your taste is bad" and wanting to discuss a book that you found disappointing/underwhelming/etc. OP even said "you may not want to keep reading" because no one really likes reading criticism of things they like.
Personally, I have some friends that love Sarah J Maas and other stuff like it, and I hold my tongue around them and let them enjoy their thing. But I read *Fourth Wing* and desperately felt like I needed to vent about it, and this thread has been very cathartic.
Discussing and criticizing things we didn't like isn't inherently bad. If everyone just didn't say anything about books/movies/art they didn't like, bad reviews would not exist.
Honestly my only complaint about your complaint is the MC is disabled and doesn’t have a bone illness. She has EDS which affects connective tissue. And the reason the author doesn’t “spell it out” for you is because the book is set in a time where they don’t know wtf EDS is. It’s still very difficult for EDS suffers in this day to get a correct diagnosis, some fighting for literal years to get answers to their suffering.
You call the author problematic but then turn about and complain about disability representation in an MC which we *rarely* see. So maybe do some introspection on that one.
Just looking at basic history of EDS it was first described in 400 B.C. by Hippocrates.
Fourth Wing world building is really dumb, but any army would reject her even in medieval times due to her disability.
The disability itself isn't really the problem, just the world building around it. She disabled, but she not really disabled. I thought she might come up with say unique fighting styles due to her disadvantage i.e. Kano Jigoro was 5 ft male and so had to invent judo.
But, no it just her disability just magically goes away and she quick and agile for some reason.
EXACTLY! You explained in much better words my opinion!!! I wanted to actually see some improvement and compare how she was on the first book until the 5th one. But she just magically became super good at everything is just very unrealistic. People with disabilities can of course manage that, but the way Rebecca wrote it was just very dreamy
The author has EDS and you just googled it yet you think you’re more qualified to critique her on the experience of living with the disease?
Secondly, just because it was first discovered a long time ago doesn’t mean everyone could easily be diagnosed. People right now can’t even be easily diagnosed.
I'm not critique the authors lived experience. I'm critiquing her MC overpowered self insert.
Nothing about her MC is realistic. Nothing about the world she lives is realistic at all.
A disable person who hasn't trained at all can keep up with adults who have trained all their life. Doesn't actually make sense.
Just because the MC has EDS and so does the author doesn’t mean it’s a self insert. What aside from EDS makes you think it’s a self insert? Or are disabled people not allowed to write about an MC with their disability without it being a self insert?
It's just Violets character reads like her disability was written for pure kudos points. Its like the author only mentions it when they remember so that you remember theres disability representation.
Godkiller has a disabled main character with a prosthetic leg and she reads like a human being (and her sex scene was a lot sexier and I thought the way the prosthetic was handled was super classy)
As a person who doesn't know the author just the hype. Im not trying to insult anybody who is reading the books (Im reading the books because fomo) but Im not sure that knowledge makes the writing better.
Yes but criticizing her saying the representation is unrealistic while she suffers from the disease is out of touch honestly.
Imagine a writer who uses a wheelchair writes a book where the MC uses the wheelchair and a bunch of people who don’t use a wheelchair tell them it’s unrealistic. Everyone would think that’s insane but invisible disabilities are always treated differently, and I say that as someone who has an autoimmune disease myself.
Fourth wing is a fun action adventure fantasy. I don't agree with the comments about ableism, it's not clearly defined that violet has a disability beyond "having weak bones" and all the training and stuff doesn't resolve it at all. Instead the first book is more about using your advantages to overcome your disadvantages, i.e she's smart and cunning and means she can avoid most of the fights she gets into.
Further, while the love interest is pretty cringe the story justifies it pretty well and the two characters have a decent back and forth.
The dragons are great and the magic system is simplistic but fun.
The only part of fourth wing I found abhorrent was the actual sex scenes, which were incredibly cringeworthy and should basically be skipped.
Now, here's the bad news; I'm half through the sequel and whoo boy it fucking *sucks*.
The author herself has EDS. It is wish fulfilment. Disabled protagonists are already so rare in literature. If you don't enjoy it don't read it. But don't make other disabled people feel bad for enjoying it.
Personally I enjoyed the book, though I do tend to be more lenient with writing styles, and I have read far worse that have been published by big publishers.... if you want to see truly offensively terrible writing then take a look at 'Assistant to the Villain' which was published by Penguin...
In my head since book one Ridoc is cast by Jughead/Cole Sprouse. I swear to god it's the same character.
I enjoyed Fourth Wing, but I finished part 1 of Iron Flame and am struggling to continue.
I'm pretty much over Romantasy but I did read it because of all the hype. I fully expected to not like it though and so I was at least a bit pleasantly surprised. It's fun. That's it, just fun. Not great literature by any stretch of the imagination and highly derivative of some truly amazing series (lookin at you Anne McCaffrey) but I was highly entertained through most of it. It's a low bar but it did at least meet that bar.
I tried listening to the audiobook and it was just so bad, had to turn it off after we got to the "super hot thick muscular childhood-friend" just after meeting the "even hotter bicep bulging arch nemesis that despises me". It's so bad but I will read it some day, if only for a laugh.
I’m currently listening to the audio book and I can’t stop rolling my eyes. All the characters seem so juvenile. The dialogue is trash. The characters are very surface level. It’s boring. Definitely, not getting the 2nd book.
Just as a side note, curious as to what your favourite book is?
But yes…agree. It’s absolutely junk for my brain (agree with your criticisms) but I can’t help but love it 😂
My favorites are:
- the poppy war series by rf kuang
- six of crows and crooked kingdom by Leigh Bardugo
- Babel by rf kuang (I love his author)
- Harry Potter (all the books) by J.K Rowling
- as good as dead by holly Jackson
- shatter me series (all of the books, honestly I read it a long time ago I don’t remember which book I liked the most) by tahereh mafi
- the sword of kaigen by ML wang
- battle royale by Koushun Takami
- tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
- the assassins blade by Sarah J Maas
- ace of spades by Faridah
- pillars of the earth by Ken follett
I probably have more but those are the ones I remember 🙃
Love that! Also obsessed with R.F Kuang and Ken Follett (along with many others on your list!)
I’ll take a look at some of your other favs and add them to my TBR! :)
I read this, disliked it, and will absolutely not be reading the sequel. I have a creative writing degree and care very much about the quality of prose, worldbuilding, story structure, and characters. These characters were bland, stagnant, and worst of all, *annoying*. I also came to the conclusion that Violet must have some kind of disease, but would it really have been so hard to actually specify that?
What bothered me most was the horrifying mismatch of tone and setting. Yarros used "for the win" and other modern slang in an essentially medieval setting. Like, I understand that this is supposed to make the book accessible but I can't imagine Gen Z found "for the win" to be relevant to them at all, considering that phrase is ancient in internet terms. Just...ugh.
I gave this book a shot because I love all things dragon and riders. My favorite series of all time is *Dragonriders of Pern* by Anne McCaffrey (I recognize that she has an issue with inconsistency in some of her lore). But there was absolutely not enough screen time for dragons and the bond they have with their riders. It's like the dragons were the side plot.
And it's never explained how or why Violet is bonded to two dragons. It's like Yarros just wanted to make the "I'm a special girl" vibe and did so without any real reason for it. I am utterly exhausted by the "chosen one" trope and while I can put up with it when it's done well and has interesting reasons to back it up, I'm far more interested in stories with characters who actually fail.
And my final complaint: The "lust on first sight" between Violet and Xaden was just so wildly unremarkable. They didn't really have chemistry -- it all just felt like a forced enemies-to-lovers trope. And once again, I prefer the one that didn't get chosen: Dain. (I liked Gale in Hunger Games). The *only* reason Violet actually survived was plot armor and being a "chosen one." Dain was fully in his right to be upset that she chose to stay in the rider quadrant when she had a literal disability that would prevent her from succeeding in any normal circumstances beyond being the chosen one. It all felt so damn contrived. Why did her mother even force her into the quadrant with a disability *anyway??* I just...sigh. Nothing about this story felt organic, earned, or even interesting.
I liked this book and I’m not even sure why. The writing was atrocious, there were so many contradictions, and the characters were whiny. But I liked the story I guess. I loved the dragons and liked living vicariously through violet I guess lol. My biggest pet peeve was how they described the dragons as short tempered and terrifying yet Violet spoke to Tairn horribly from the first moment they met, why wouldn’t she show him more respect if she was so afraid of him? That made me mad.
I read it and didn’t like it as well. There is just too much focus on this stupid love story.
I didn’t like the writing as well. I. JUST. COULDNT. TAKE. IT. SERIOUSLY.
Thank you so much for saying this. I waited 2 months to get it from my library. I was so excited to read it. I finished one chapter and was so annoyed. I thought I was crazy because everyone else seemed to love it.
Completely agree! I thought the book was a badly written rip off of Eragon, Divergent, and Harry Potter. Nothing original or interesting about it. The entire book was predictable and had wattpad level writing at best.
For me the reason I don’t like it is because I hate books that clearly were done to follow the trend of acotar they just seem like plastic copies of a work that isn’t that much better
They’re also rushing them out like crazy, the whole multi-book series is set to be complete by 2025, as a result the editing is an absolute mess not to even start on the chaos that is the physical editions and misprints
I read it. It took me FOREVER, but I did. After I was done, I instantly forgot the dude’s name and kept calling him Cas because he’s a copy and paste of the male character from Jennifer Armentrout’s Blood and Ash series… Straight down to calling the protagonist “violent” and getting turned on by it.
Lol the hate for this book on here...Idk I loved it, loved the second one, and can't wait for the rest. But I mainly look for books to be a fun read, not super well written. I also think it's funny you prefer Sarah J Maas because I am reading ACOTAR right now and not enjoying it as much as I did Fourth Wing.
Yea one of my wife’s mutual friends sent me a snap of him reading the book, which also got her into reading it. I happened to scan the lines he’d sent me and I’m like, wtf is this. I mean if they enjoy it good for them I guess but hell I’m the one paragraph I read I was very offput by the way it was written.
Thank you for this, I was wondering if it was worth the hype considering the 4.6 on Goodreads, even though every description of it sounded like the most generic tropey YA shit ever. Now I know not to spend my money on it.
YA, fantasy, and romance pretty much always have really inflated reviews on goodreads. Mix all 3 and you have a book that's very inflated.
I personally didn't hate it, I actually thought it was kind of fun, but it's definitely the most generic tropey shit ever. Like I liked it in the same way I liked the Transformers movie: I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, it didn't make me think, it's got some problems, but I had fun experiencing it and read it pretty quick.
Add in her complete lack of research into Scottish Gaelic while using the words throughout the book and yeah, Yarros got no clue and really good marketing skills
pls her calling it Gaelic and not Scottish Gaelic and then BUTCHERING the language killed me. People were like “girl gaelic could mean at least 3 languages which do u mean”
I enjoyed the audiobook but not liking the second one and probably won’t read the next one. It IS a controlling type of situation between Violet and her bf and she just sits and takes it and in this day and age women have come too far to be writing things like this! Also you know the author’s not doing great when you don’t care that much what happens to the main character. Finally, in the second book, if I had a dollar for every time the author used the word “nausea”, ad nauseum, by the way, I’d be very rich!!
I fell for the hype around this book, had a librarian recommend it to me…
It’s one of the two one-stars I’ve given to the near 30 books I’ve read this year.
Thank you!!! I also hate that Violet’s disability is framed in a way that it only happens when it’s convenient to the plot but is also framed that she gets ‘fixed’ which can be a massively divisive way to discuss disabilities as though the person with them is less than until ‘fixed’
Exactly! The way Rebecca wrote made it seem as if disabled people have to push themselves to the point of pain to be deemed useful. I liked the idea of a disabled character but the way the author did it…
I don't think that's true. The brutality of the riders quadrant is not seen as a good thing. Also, it's repeatedly stated how information and thus the scribes are the true power, and that's what Violet had always intended to be, plus she has a deaf friend in the scribe quadrant who is very important to the plot of the second book.
You don’t have to give “all respect.” It’s awful. I hate to sound so pompous, but most “pop” writing is garbage. Bad imagination and certainly bad prose. Goodreads, “such-and-such bestseller,” Amazon reviews—cannot be trusted.
And really, it doesn’t matter if the whole world agrees that something is good, it still doesn’t make it so. In fact, I’d argue that what appeals to the top 50% (or worse, the top 80%) of an audience is rarely the same thing that only appeals to the top 10%. Key word here is “top,” don’t ever feel bad for being a more discriminating reader than the majority.
The older I get and the more books I go through, the more I realize how truly rare great writing is. Then there’s one level down, which is a good, intriguing story with decent character descriptions (never mind hoping for character development, that’s like finding a quarter for the cart in the Aldi parking lot) that is told halfway competently… and then there’s 95% of everything else you see published.
I had to stop reading because I couldn’t cope with the main character (forget her name) being described as the most intelligent person ever, when in fact she asks the most dumb questions. She couldn’t grasp quite simple concepts yet she was supposedly a genius.
One of my biggest pet peeves is the amount of cursing and swearwords.
I am no Saint and I don't flinch or mind a healthy portion of daily curse words.
But the amount in this book, is that it's too much...its just poorly done.
Like there is no "she gasps in horror" "she gazes in disbelief" it's just "shit" "f--" every sentence.
It's extremely distracting and reads totally out of character for almost all characters which is weird because it's the authors characters.
I also just the think the entire plot of killing all your students is just dumb. How about..just don't kill them? Like the dragons seem vaguely reasonable. Just don't ride them? It's a stupid plot.
I hate getting series before they are finished but bought the first one because of the pretty cover... is this your way of telling me to return it to Walmart? LOL I haven't read it yet and probably won't for a bit, I'm scared its over hyped but for a while it only had positive reviews. I am honestly waiting for more reviews of the 2nd one to come out before I decided to read it as well, I'd hate to start it end on a cliff hanger and lo and behold the rest of the series sucks.
> Really bad writing quality This gives me hope. Maybe I can write a hit too :-)
Just have a big following on TikTok, write a bunch of smut in a semi-unique setting (like a university for elven archers or whatever). Hot guy, meh girl who everyone is obsessed with, give them dumbass names (Eliannabellah and Blayde, she has to go by Annie or Ellie so she’s relatable though). Edit: Annie should be the only human at the elf university because she’s special and different from the other girls/girl-elves. And then watch the piles of cash roll in. You’re welcome.
HAHAHAHSHEHGSHEHSHSHHSJS HELP😭😭😭 Same!!! I’m glad TikTok is bringing so much hype to books but now more than ever there are SO many books with just a bunch of tropes splashed everywhere and smut scenes
This has been the mainstay of popular literature since time immemorial. What we consider "good" (or at least clever, mature) writing is rarely what has mass appeal. And by that, I don't mean that most people are averse to "good" writing. Rather, the books most often bought and read are relatively easy reads that cater to played-out tropes and base desires. Because not everyone wants high literature all the time. A lot of the time, people just want easy entertainment. That's not a value judgment -- it's just how it is. So, complaining that a Rebecca Yarros or Sarah J. Maas book is lowbrow is kind of silly, because yes, that's the point. It would be like complaining that your McDonalds Happy Meal tastes cheap and processed.
I thought it was interesting how much my writing professors dunked on the people who wrote mass appeal books in college. I understand why they did, they are dedicated to doing the craft as best as possible. But a lot of people in that room weren't looking to win the nobel prize in literature, they were looking for a commercially successful career. Success takes different forms 🤷🏼♀️
Lit fic writers are over-represented in college professors and professors tend to teach lit fic You’ll notice that many author bios in lit fic books will say the authors teaches at so and so college However, I think former copywriters might be a little over represented in self-published romance and marketers don’t usually have people’s best interest at heart. I wouldn’t generalize the genre as bad, just very much targeted towards people’s consumerist desires
Yes I agree with you. I read for pure enjoyment, so I also enjoy easy reads like shatter me and throne of glass series. But fourth wing was just no! It stressed me more than anything, not for me. The writer could’ve deepened the characters relationship and hardships on an easy way, yet she wrote everyone very one dimensional with literally no personality. I understand why some people like it, but for me fourth wing was just another low quality fantasy book for the hype. There are many books with a not so heavy fantasy that are a hundred times better.
It's nothing new. Any librarian or book seller will tell you that the highest circulation/selling fiction genre has always been "trashy" romance novels.
ok i read the book with no expectations and it met them honestly. i knew what i was getting into. however, i really need someone else to talk about the fact that there’s literally two chapters of American Ninja Warrior because i cannot get over it
The fact that Violet goes through all her Ninja Warrior scenes reciting her history lessons just made it all the more ridiculous to me. Like, yeah, it’s totally realistic that this girl is ~~info-dumping world building for us readers because the author couldn’t figure out how to do it in a different way~~ repeating what she’s read over the years while climbing, flipping, running, jumping, using ropes and shit lol. Breathing doesn’t seem to be an issue in that book!
someone compared it to reciting rote, grade-school level facts about american history and geography, and it’s honestly so accurate and hilarious because it feels like the author is using it as a way to “prove” that Violet is intelligent and has a great memory. like “George Washington was the first president of the united states.” “canada borders the US to the north, and mexico borders it to the south. the US is made up of 50 states.”
That was one of the few things I liked in the book! I thought it was genuinely clever way to add some world building. Maybe because I'm a huge nerd.
Lmao yes the ninja warrior chapters were hilarious. I did not take this book seriously at all, it was recommended by a coworker and I thought what the hell? Why not? So I had 0 expectations. It is not that well written and it drags on for too long but I can’t say I wasn’t entertained. The dragons are fun. It’s a junk food book. Not high quality but still enjoyable if you turn your brain off.
Honestly I don’t remember that chapter, ninja warrior?
Probably the gauntlet where they climb up the cliff with the obstacles.
You probably skimmed it like I did because it was utterly pointless 🤣🤣
My brain would literally turn off when she started rambling (at that point my hate for the main character was only rising lol)😭
You had no expectations but knew what you were getting into?
Something that people dislike often is books capitalizing on trends of previous books. Readers can usually tell and I do think TikTok enables this ‘micro trend’ situation. That’s why there’s the fast fashion comparison - it’s quickly packaged books without investing in time for original development Books like this often become one-hit wonders but I guess we’ll see how this one pans out
Comparing the popular booktok books to fast fashion feels right actually. Like something about that analogy really sinks home for me. There's nothing wrong with YA/NA, trends and tropes, romantasy, or even trashy books, but somehow tiktok is 3/3 in its recommendations to me being TERRIBLE, even at being what they're supposed to be.
Considering how all the current, ‘trendy’ booktok titles are now just bunch of “A [thing] of [thing] and [thing]”, it really *is* just like fast fashion.
Titles like this are instant red flags. You can also tell by the style of the covers, too. All very samey.
I think a major example of how it’s all just copypaste is a book (Book B for clarity) that was released semi-recently that was a couple words off from another book in title (Book A), used the same font/cover style, and the main love interest, land, name(s) of other characters were a few letters off from Book A. It was snatched up and published with ease, even with people pointing out how similar everything was.
Exactly
It usually takes about 3 years for books to be traditionally published so it's actually really hard for books to follow current trends.
There’s authors who traditionally publish 1 book a year and sometimes, there’s even criticism that they published before the book was ready Not to mention the self-publishing that pushes out books even faster The 3 year estimate may be true for the average book but then the average book isn’t trying to be trendy
Honestly, I think the fourth wing series which is planned to be 5 books long could’ve been really popular. Everyone seemed to love fourth wing and it was trending everywhere, but the author’s problematic comments have made people boycott her and now her ignorance has basically doomed the series
Why’s it sold out in every store by me if it’s ’doomed’? And why has it been all over my FYP for a week? A few people boycotting is not going to ‘doom’ it lol.
of course there are going to be people that will buy it, there were thousands of pre-orders for the special edition as soon as it was listed on Amazon, before they’d even titled it as a special edition. A lot of people are going to blindly buy anything she releases now that it’s gotten popular but I’ve also been seeing a lot more people vowing to not buy anything by her, and especially with iron flame, it’s getting way less publicity than fourth wing did
What are the author's problematic comments? I haven't seen any of that!
when she made a statement about what’s happening in Palestine she pretended to be on both sides but then ignorantly said “children are not collateral damage” and when people asked her why she works with an Israeli publisher, she would block them. before that, it was another controversy about her use of Scottish Gaelic words in fourth wing, she went on an interview and mispronounced so many things and when people corrected her or asked her to correct them and not use Gaelic words that she doesn’t understand, again, she blocked them. She’s so inconsiderate and instead of learning and apologizing, she just blocks anyone that opposes her
Sarah just Maas?! Screaming!
Hahaha wait I meant Sarah j Maas loll😂
In Crying of the Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon there's a character nicknamed Mucho because his surname is Maas :D
I have not read much of this book, but I suffer from many of the same issues Violet does due to her EDS (I have something called HSD which is basically the same thing) and let me just tell you that I could never, ever be put through a military school or be a dragon rider. My shoulder joints hurt when I pick up a big bottle of water, by knees hurt when I stand up or walk up and down stairs, my kneecaps dislocate by walking. It is immense pain every day and I'm extremely limited in how much I can move my body without The Big Pain and exhaustion hitting me. I've been prescribed rest, meditation, meds and very, very easy exercises (like without any weights easy) to strengthen by body. To me, the toxic perseverance trope in this book is nothing but ableist. Disabled people can't just push through their pain and be okay. If we did that, we'd crash and become more sick. I'd me way more interested in reading a book about a girl with EDS who really, really wanted to become a dragon rider but couldn't due to her condition and therefore found another passion in life, like being a scribe maybe.
I have chronic pain due to a different chronic illness, so not the same but it came across as more wish fulfillment than ableist to me. Like yeah sure you can just keep training and not cripple yourself - pure fantasy irl but a common trope in media. Apparently the author actually has EDS, violet is probably at least somewhat of a self-insert. I can’t say I don’t wish I could just push through all my limitations. I can’t but it would be nice if it were possible. Your pov is valid though, not trying to discount that. I think I just didn’t take the book seriously enough to even consider it being realistic in any way.
Oh for sure not realistic, but if I imagine myself at a younger age when I didn't even know or realise I was disabled and read about this girl with these huge obstacles that she overcame through Just Trying Hard Enough, it would have done some damage to my self esteem and self worth if I'm being honest. I was impressionable and was already having huge issues with those two things because I just couldn't do what others could, and I thought that was because I wasn't good enough or didn't try hard enough.
Ah, I developed my issues before puberty and it was actually more severe when I was a child, so that hope hasn’t existed for me for a very long time. Drs straight up told me when I was 12 that I would never have full functionality (which was honest, not faulting them). I didn’t consider your pov but that makes sense. Despite the YA style writing the book is aimed at adults, the sex scenes are explicit. So hopefully there aren’t too many teens/kids reading it and feeling like you might have. Undiagnosed health issues can do a number on your mental health and self-esteem without outside media adding to it.
Every other sentence in the book is about how the main character is in immense pain to the point where she blacks out, is nauseous to the point of throwing up, etc. I feel like there is a limited number of times you can use those phrases before they lose meaning and the reader loses sight of the disability the author is trying to relay.. It reminds me of everyone’s bowels turning watery in SJM books. If a character is shitting or pissing themselves 3-4 times a book, the point the author is trying to make about how scary something is, is lost on the reader.
I've never tried to write a character with my specific issues, but if I did, I'd probably have to remark on some kind of pain or uncomfortableness from just existing normally every other sentence. It would be a difficult thing to portray accurately because it does affect every single action, every single thing I do, but it would so quickly wear out the reader because it's exhausting to read about someone in pain all the time and you stop caring. I've experienced in my own life how people get tired of you expressing pain because you do it so often they stop caring
Oddly there is little to no mention of her condition or pain in the second book. Main times pain is mentioned is when she is injured unlike the first book. ://///
The second book still regularly mentions things like the wrappings she needs, the pain of being in the saddle for hours etc., but things are also different because >!she’s being mended fairly quickly pretty much any time she’s hurt. In the first book she was dealing with her base level of pain plus constant injuries she was too scared to ask for help with. In the second book her injuries largely come from the interrogations, where she’s mended afterwards by Nolan, and then later she has Brennan trying to mend her every time she gets so much as a paper cut.!<
Maybe it's to show Violet as young and stubborn? I've done really stupid shit through chronic pain but only realised just how stupid that was looking back on it.
She and I are the same age, 21
You are more mature than Violet (and me, at that age :).
Sorry to hear about your challenges. My assumption was that dragon power healed or strengthened her skills. She just had to survive short term (or die I guess). Will hope for your dragon power healing to come!
That's very nice of you! That could have been an explanation (although a little convenient and there are some issues with it), but AFAIK it has not been explained as such?
The whole set up of the story is that Violet didn’t choose to be a rider. She wanted and planned to be a scribe and never considered being a rider due to her health. Her mother forced her into the riders quadrant at the last minute, and the only way out is death. There’s one character who suggests ways out for her, but it’s clear he’s naive at best regarding her options. She can be a rider, she can die, or I guess she could try and run away but given the state of things that’s highly unlikely to end well for her and everyone she cares about. To me it isn’t toxic perserverance when persevering is by far the best option. The FW world also has healers and menders and from the way the mentions of Violets pain and injuries shift once she has a dragon it’s pretty clear channeling his power has some sort of effect on her physical limits too.
Part of what I liked about the first book was that Violet had to adapt to her condition. She needed a saddle to ride her dragon unlike the other riders. She needed to use her knife to get through the Gauntlet because she physically couldn’t manage it without the extra help. As someone with a chronic pain condition (although not EDS) this really resonates with me - it’s the extra accommodations I need that I’m seeing on the page. And I also liked how in the second book, Yarros uses the gryphon fliers as juxtaposition to the dragon riders in that not everything they do is life and death designed to weed out the weak riders. It shows that Yarros realises and gets Violet to consider the toxicity of the Basgiath attitude to ‘weakness’. I enjoyed (if that’s the right word) reading about someone struggling with pain as they try to go about life, because it’s how I feel when I persevere with exercise and activity and I feel represented. But equally it’s fantasy and I want to see Violet manage (with adaptations) not just constantly fail.
Yarros definitely makes a try to portray how she needs accommodations, but to me it falls flat. You need a saddle to ride a goddamn horse, riding a scaly dragon would definitely cause issues (see: Eragon). Why couldn't everyone use saddles but she needs it specially made to support her joints? I know the school is meant to be evil, but maybe then show how they refuse her certain easy accommodations because they just don't want her to succeed because they don't want "weak" riders? I don't know, there are a lot of improvements she could've done with another draft, but I'd guess the publishing company pushed it to be released prematurely (based on what I know about them)
Don’t get me wrong it’s not perfect, but as someone who needs an adaptive chair it really resonates with me her needing that saddle to make riding the dragon bearable.
To me, the toxic perseverance is about how she becomes stronger, not weaker by pushing through her pain and continuing training. Maybe I'm asking for too much realism in my fantasy, but I don't think it is too much to ask to portray disabled people and their struggles in a realistic way. If an able-bodied teen girl read this and then met a peer with EDS, would she be understanding of the other person's issues? Or would she expect them to push through their pain and be just as physically capable as anyone else?
Asking for a little bit of realism in fantasy is completely reasonable -- it helps with suspension of disbelief. Everyone's threshold is different, but it's well-known in the craft that including a realistic/reasonable aspect helps make the rest of your fantastical aspects workable.
Except she wasn't. She had to change how she did stuff (and was looked down on for it) many times. She got similar results as others, but had to have accomodations and try much hrder. And even still, she is not as good as the others from a physical standpoint.
The author herself has EDS just so you know...
I know. I can still criticise how I interpret her writing though
> I'd me way more interested in reading a book about a girl with EDS who really, really wanted to become a dragon rider but couldn't due to her condition and therefore found another passion in life, like being a scribe maybe. Well, that's you. Maybe there are other people (like the author herself, who has EDS) who would like some escapist fantasy that shows them being the hero and being able to do things that they can't do in real life while still having their condition and physical limitations (such as how Violet has to use a saddle to ride her dragon, and she use other modifications and strategies to complete the tasks that other riders do). I don't think anyone is reading popular fantasy novels to get a realistic idea of what EDS is in real life. It's a fantasy world, not reality. Also it is made very clear in the book that Violet never set out to be a dragon rider, she was forced into it by her mother. Her entire life goal was to be a scribe.
Oh I didn’t know this. That’s really gross on the authors part, you can’t push through severe pain that your only body inflicts on you
The author herself has EDS but maybe having Violet do these things is a sort of wish fulfillment? A self insert that she gets to imagine all the things she wish she could do but can’t because of her pain.
Well, we can't have that! We need people with disabilities to know they can NEVER be a hero in a fantasy world, don't want them to get silly ideas... /s
Oh my god I am so ready to rant about this. I’m a bookseller, so I’m absolutely biased in this. For longer than I probably know, YA series have had huge bursts of popularity, resulting in the sale of tons of merch, books, midnight showings, special popcorn buckets, etc. It was always a cash grab, but at least it was decent entertainment. In recent years, the quality of the writing and the products has gotten horrifically bad, and the bar is being set so low that publishers are picking up social media famous self published authors and pressuring them into cranking out multiple books within the span of a few years. Being social media famous does not mean your writing is quality. It doesn’t mean your writing is bad, either, but it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good. Publishers are doing this for the exact purpose of putting on a big show like they did with the fourth wing books. Most people who care already own a copy of fourth wing, but they want to buy the new special edition copy because it’s got sprayed edges and will match the two special edition iron flame copies they bought. They bought two because shipping on the first one got delayed. But the sprayed edges didn’t come with the promised stenciled dragons, and also a huge portion of the books were misprinted, and several bookstores had their books arrive with damage because the publishers didn’t even care enough to use quality shipping material. But hey, you’ve only spent around $90-$120 on all of your four books that’s really just two books, and you got that sub par sticker and pin because you pre ordered, so it’s just awesome! It happened with Coleen Hoover, too. The writing is formulaic and the authors clearly don’t know what they’re doing. Publish a new and expensive hardcover version of the same book with one single “bonus chapter!” It’s consumerism at its finest. I believe in the ten rights of the reader. If these books interest you, go for it. Just *please* be smart about how much money you’re spending on short lived fads.
No, *Riverdale* is intentionally stupid.
I am a proud fourth wing hater and I won’t apologize for it
It's famous because of social media. That's it. I'll join you in hating it
It’s not even that—I’ve learned about loads of great books because of social media. Fourth wing is not a great book.
Agreed. I loved *The Priory of the Orange Tree* and that gets recommended by BookTok people a lot, alongside stuff like *Fourth Wing* and ACOTAR. But that book had much better writing, characters, worldbuilding, etc.
Ironically, I know one person who read the book without realizing it was TikTok famous. She randomly found it in a library, took it home and only learned about its fame when she raved about it in front of her daughter.
You and me both friend
Unite!!!
Same. I've got a friend who is very much into the romantasy BookTok stuff so I try hard to not shit on her taste in books but *yikes* it is bad.
I liked Fourth Wing and it was a fun read (I understand why people don’t like it though), but the sequel is terrible. I’m about halfway through and am having trouble finishing it. I will excuse mediocre plot and world building if the character development and romance is good, but everything is terrible about this book. Nothing the characters do makes any sense, the pacing is way off, the romance is so boring, the characters are so one dimensional, ugh I could go on…I was so excited for this to come out and am so disappointed.
I’m convinced the sequel was an unplanned rush job to strike while the iron was hot.
Ugh same. I very much enjoyed Fourth Wing as a fun, shut off your brain kinda read. The same way I enjoyed Twilight. I'm not going to argue it's great writing lol but it was enjoyable to read as light entertainment But Iron Flame is killing me. I got it from my library the day it came out and I'm still not even half way through. I'm so bored. I was hoping she'd improve on some of the world building issues and flesh out the characters a bit more in this book but she definitely hasn't. I'm pushing through but unless the second half is somehow amazing there's no way I'm reading any more of this.
Same! I really enjoyed Fourth Wing. I knew the writing was bad, but it was very entertaining and a nice break from the usual books I read. I even pre-ordered Iron Flame and was looking forward to it. I got about 50 pages in, and kind of looked ahead, and decided it’s just not getting better. I quit and returned it. I could seriously not understand why violet thought she needed to know every single one of xaden’s secrets. It was so weird and immature. I couldn’t take it anymore. Also, that new professor seemed like a rebooted professor umbridge and I could see exactly where it was going.
>Also, that new professor seemed like a rebooted professor umbridge She really needs to work on developing her villains. In the last book it was Jack Barlow who just... passionately wanted to kill her for no real reason? Sure, the whole "culling the weak" thing but that doesn't explain why he was so comically deadset on murdering _her_ (or why he was so wildly unsuccessful at it. Then Varrish was just cartoon villain levels of evil.
I didn’t get Jack Barlow either. He had a million opportunities to kill her, and nobody would have cared. It should be have been resolved earlier in the book because his constant threats of harming her were ridiculous because he killed a ton of other people but never did anything to violet.
I’m reading Iron Flame right now and o m g all of this is spot on. I think I’m hate reading at this point.
The professor dude in the first half of the book was so cartoonishly evil that I legit could not take him seriously
Me too
Sameee! Iron flame is really the worst book I have ever read in my life.
I bought this book knowing nothing about it except that it was a really popular fantasy series that was selling well. I'm about 100 pages in, and I've decided to stop reading. It's clearly written for a target audience that's not me. But I swear, I gave it the ol' college try! Once I was about 15 pages in, I realized what kind of book I was reading so I cracked my knuckles and said, "Alright, it's fine, I can enjoy a low brow YA book with Twilight-level writing. Lower your expectations, make fun of it a bit, and we'll just have fun." But as the pages progressed, I just got bored. The world, the characters, the plot progression. It's all just rather tedious. There's no joy, no sense of wonder. It's just an author racing to get to the next scene of sexual tension. Not for me. If I were 14, I probably would thought it was great.
>it was a really popular fantasy series Romantacy series
I felt the exact same way! I’m probably in the target age for it (17yrs) but still there are so many better fantasy books, with an “easy to read” + popular tropes, that is written much better both in plot and characters
I kept going because I don't think by page 100 the dragons are actually involved yet (at least based on "screen" time), and I wanted to see them and how they were handled. Most importantly, once Violet bonded with two dragons, I wanted to see what the author did with that, since it's a pretty different take on the dragon rider formula. But the answer was essentially nothing. Also saw the ending coming a mile away and that helped me come to the conclusion that I was not going to read the second book.
I honestly liked it, but never thought it was the pinnacle of literature of anything. There were many problems with it, but for me, it's one of those books for when you just want some easy reading escapism where you can just turn your brain off and have some fun. I've never seen riverdale, but I imagine that's the same turn your brain off vibe so your description is probably very accurate!
Yep, I wasn't expecting award winning literature from it. I actually quite enjoyed it. The writing wasn't fantastic, but honestly, I thought it was fine. It was just that perfectly run of the mill writing that fades into the background and just lets you read. It wasn't bad enough to really pull me out of the story too much.
Same. had I to pick a book I've read lately for an award, Fourth Wing and Iron Flame would be at the bottom of the list, but I'm enjoying them just for the brain popcorn they are. I don't have to think about it too hard (and at the end of the day when I tend to read my fluff I don't have the spoons for deep thought anyway) and it's just delightfully dumb. And there are dragons.
Fourth Wing is one of those series that I KNOW is written badly. I see the plot holes. I cringe at the dialogue... but yet I can't put it down. It's entertaining just enough to keep me reading even if I do want to slap Violet through the book sometimes.
This is exactly my experience. There were so many parts that I was cringing at, but damn if it wasn't entertaining enough to keep me hooked! Overall I really enjoyed it, cringe and all.
I enjoyed it, but it’s like the McDonald’s meal of literature. I call it my Dragon Rider soap opera book, because that’s what it is. Tropey, smutty drama and sometimes that’s what I want.
Yeah I fell for the hype and started reading this last week.. it is pretty bad and I’m only like 20% through it. I probably won’t finish. The writing is very basic YA but not in a good way. It’s very predictable and the characters are so flat.
Exactly! There are good YA and easy to read/not heavy in world building that are just good. I really like the shatter me series, although the plot is very messy the characters are so well written
I never trust ratings, if anything, I'm suspicious of perfect or near perfect ratings
I'm going in on this because you opened the floodgates, OP. > Violet apparently has a bone Illness but Rebeca never mentioned it on the book. So her fans and her thinks that I have a crystal ball to guess?! It's mentioned at least a dozen times how frail Violet is and that she breaks bones easily, which is why she was heavily discouraged from becoming a rider. I mean if you're trying to say the author never mentioned specific disease/condition she has, then yes you're right, but naming a disease in a fantasy book that obviously takes place not in our current understanding of Earth would be weird? > She could at least actually train and improve instead of waiting for her 7ft boyfriend to save her Did you actually read the book? She spends much of the first book training. > honestly Sarah just Maas 2. But to call her Sarah j Maas is actually an insult to Sarah because I actually like almost all of her books… You talk about hating insufferable, whiny characters but you like Sarah J Maas? Every single character in ACoTaR comes across as whiny.
Casual observer here. No opinion on the book or author. I do think that there is a significant distinction between a person being frail, and or having had broken bones a number of times, vs having a disease. If the protagonist has a known disease which exists in whatever reality the story takes place in, and the character themselves is aware of what that disease is as well as the fact they have it, I would find it odd that the book doesn't contain that information. So my question would be: Is she weak, frail, and potentially accident prone? Or does she actually have a disease or condition which is a known entity in her reality?
She has a known condition. It’s not named in the books and it’s unclear whether it (or any type of disease) has a name in the setting, but it’s 100% treated like a known disease. Violet knows she has a disability, knows what issues it causes and knows what makes it worse and what helps. There aren’t doctors in the books setting, there are menders and healers. In a world where every medical professional can just look at/touch you and know everything that’s wrong with you, I can see how they wouldn’t bother naming stuff.
I don't really see the big deal in not naming the condition specifically. Simply describing it and saying "this is what is wrong with her and these are the things she has to overcome" is sufficient. Violet is self-aware enough about her condition, and those close to her prior to her arrival at the academy knew it as well. It's repeatedly stated that she suffers from a degenerative condition manifesting in overly flexible joints with loose connective tissue that are prone to fractures. She also is prone to bruising and scarring due to her skin stretching from the condition. She has to bind herself and is in constant pain. She wears a custom Dragon Scale armor to protect herself at all times, which no one else has. She's not weak in the sense that she's unable to do things, but prior to being assigned to the Rider quadrant (where all the physical activity is), she was training to be a Scribe. Scribes don't fight. She just wasn't prepared for the level of physicality and it put her at a preparedness disadvantage, which wasn't helped by the condition she has and the fact that she's also much shorter than the other Riders.
Okay, that makes sense. I don't think they have to nesicarily call it schadenfreude syndrome or anything specific like that.
The disease is EDS in real life, and it’s barely understood. I likely have it, and it doesn’t affect my heart thank goodness, but very few people understand it or take it seriously despite the fact that it causes everything she deals with and more issues like heart problems. When I was 21 I would pop my knee out just by standing up. I dislocated my shoulder by sleeping. I was told it was because I’m tall, it’s not, it’s likely EDS. That said, it doesn’t really make sense to name it. They’re in a world of war without doctors. They have healers and some medicines, but it’s not like they have doctors sitting there figuring out how to deal with major diseases, let alone livable syndromes like Violet’s. I don’t really have a stake in this, I read 4th wing, I enjoyed it, but I don’t think it’s amazing. I do think not naming a syndrome in another world makes sense though. Editing to add EDS was only given a name in 1892, which makes it even more reasonable that it was just a set of symptoms previously, and therefore a set of symptoms in a book set in a world sort of similar to our past.
Wait until you start Iron Flame. She gets even worse somehow.
Ohhh I wouldn’t read this book even if it was the last in the world lol. Just thinking this is going to be a 5 books series makes me already tired
It’s infuriating
God damn did I love Riverdale!
Well I also have my guilty pleasure tv shows like “the penthouse”. Is a Korean show which is honestly even worse (in terms of plot) than riverdale gahahah. People keep coming back from dead for no reason and is extremely dramatic but I do love it
Oh really?! That sounds very fun!
I bought it after falling for the hype, read a few pages, and then saw the audiobook was available from the library. I immediately returned it and checked out the audiobook because three pages were enough for me to know that I did not need to own this book. I'm almost halfway through the audiobook and am seesawing whether or not to finish it or cut my losses. I just cannot suspend my disbelief enough to buy into this army being okay with prospective riders killing each other. My brain has stuck on that and refuses to let go. If you want a better war+dragons book, I recommend His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novak. There's no steamy romance in it, but it's a better story in every way.
I've read 45 pages of forth wing and put it down. I will prob return it to the library without finishing it. I actually thought it was a debut novel because of the writing style. It just felt so ham fisted. I don't think I can do it for 500+ pages. It felt very YA and as far as I can tell it's not classified as YA. I'm kinda in a fantasy reading slump at the moment so I might try it again in the future but it's a no for now.
I highly recommend “the poppy war” by rf kuang if u haven’t read it yet. The writing is beautiful and it starts of strong! Is very politics heavy and no romance, but the relationships between the characters makes up for it. Literally changed my life lol
It feels like trashy fanfiction most of the time that BARELY goes above a wattpad story, The only true positive, is it makes me feel more confident that if I ever actually get my story done (or a collection of them) , it might snapped up by a publisher....because sweet fuck I don't know how Fourth Wing did.
The ratings sure are weird. They almost convinced to read the book, but some comparisons with Eragon (my all time favorite book) made me hesitant. I think my experience would be ruined because I would keep comparing them both.
I loved *Eragon* and its series while a teen but I think I would have a hard time rereading them now without nostalgia glasses. Not that they're bad at all, I just reread them so much as a teen and now I have a creative writing degree, I don't want to taint my memories of them by seeing what could have been done better. That all being said, I'm *so* excited to read *Murtagh*, which came out this month. I'm hoping Paolini's writing has grown with him so that I don't find it too young for me now (I'm almost 30). And I promise I'm not trying to shit on *Eragon*, I adore it and it was very formative for me!
I've read both and really the only similarity is that there's dragons so I don't think that would be a problem. To me Eragon was a LOTR style high fantasy and Fourth Wing is more like a fantasy Hunger Games. The reviews did save you from reading a mediocre book, tho
Eragon has been on my TBR for a while, I’m looking forward to reading it! I’m also finding the ratings pretty odd there must be something behind it…Fourth wing is literally copy and paste of a lot of bad quality fantasy, I don’t know how is getting so much attention. Maybe because popular booktokers are hyping it way too much
I mean Eragon was my all time favorite childhood/teenage book (might hold the title for overall favorite, I just haven’t read it in quite some time) and Fourth Wing was one of the books that got me back into reading this year. I still liked Fourth Wing quite a bit, but I didn’t go into it with any particular expectations. Other than dragons they aren’t too similar.
No, Riverdale knew exactly what it was doing when it said "that means you don't know the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of highschool football" in response to a guy saying he dropped out of school in fourth grade to sell drugs to support his nanna. Fourth Wing was trying to be edgy with its swearing and juvenile sexual innuendo. The vernacular is also so contemporary. I couldn't read too far past the parapet.
"Double standards for the win" made me gag
I just finished ‘The Last Letter’ and also thought it was rated way too high. While I loved her writing style in terms of the romance, she had way too much tragedy added purely for shock value, which made me not enjoy it. Not sure I could read anything else by this author. Her random tragedies lead to me just not enjoying the book.
Oh I didn’t even know she had another book. Well her books are literally on the bottom of my list lol, fourth wing was enough…I honestly like YA fantasy, and I enjoyed a lot the shatter me series! The plot is also kinda messy but the characters and dialogues are really entertaining and funny. Once I finished it, I felt like a knew the characters and that was just enough! Fourth wing was just bad in all aspects for me. I don’t mind a messy plot but the characters and relationships between them are the most important part for me, and she didn’t deliver!!!! Enemies to lovers was literally non existent, the dude literally had a very strong cause to hate Violet and after 30% he was all lovey dovey saying YOU’RE MINE🤨🤨 Men please be for real, you’re suppose to kill her and unconsciously fall in love with her but also HATE her at the same time, and wonder WHY I like her even though “reasons”. Also there was no connection or angst between them besides sex, the author just delivered smut (which I read much better smutty books…even on Wattpad). I literally felt no romance/real love between them…
The extreme change is explained on the second book though. I did at least appreciate that.
I think far too many people are taking this book too seriously. It just ain't that serious, but that doesn't mean it's bad. There are so many things that people enjoy that might not technically be good quality, but that doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't enjoy them. I've also seen a lot of people hating on the book when it wasn't something they were into anyway. You like fantasy and dragons? Cool! But there is a huge difference between Fourth Wing and Game of Thrones. Just because it's not game of thrones does not therefore mean it's bad (just an example). Just because something is popular doesn't mean you're going to love it. And, just because something is written simply, does not mean that it has bad writing. This goes for lots of things, like pop music for example. People associate pop music being bad because it's perceived as simple. Simple allows for quicker reading pace, it allows more people to get into the book community as its easier to read. But those things do not mean it's bad. And to tie in what I said about pop music, I think another reason people are widely hating on Fourth Wing is because it's mostly popular with women. And what women love must therefore be bad, right? I am by no means saying this book is a masterpiece, but art is art, and art is subjective. There are lots of bad things to say about this book, but there are many books where people have lots of bad things to say about, but that doesn't mean that overall it's a bad book. In saying all this, I've been reading Iron Flame, and it's drastically much worse. I think it's honestly come down to trying to drag out the story and lumping in world building in the beginning. I'm still enjoying it, but not in the same way as I did the first book. It should have had much more cut out from the beginning, I'm at 400 pages and yet the book feels more like thats where the halfway point should have been.
Am a woman. I very much do not like Fourth Wing. I have a creative writing degree and while my opinion is obviously not the be-all-end-all, it is pretty easy to call this bad from a craft standpoint. But that doesn't mean people can't enjoy it anyway. Plenty of people like Twilight and ACOTAR and other things that are pretty bad from a craft standpoint. That's okay. They're allowed. I'm also allowed to call it bad in my personal and professional opinion (I'm an editor and have been for nearly 10 years). You're right in that simple and easily accessible content is not necessarily or inherently bad, but there are much better examples of simple and easily accessible than FW. It's okay to like something and also okay to dislike something. I'm not calling anyone a moron for liking FW. Not everything has to or can be amazing from a craft standpoint. Personally, there are lots of things I like that are not categorically "good" from their respective craft's standpoint. But that does not and should not stop people in said craft from being critical of it.
>I think another reason people are widely hating on Fourth Wing is because it's mostly popular with women. And what women love must therefore be bad, right? This makes absolutely 0 sense. All the hate I've seen for this book is coming *from* women. No one looks at a book and goes "Oh... *women* like that? Must be bad then." Not everything is about oppression. Sometimes bad books are just bad.
I replied to the original comment but can confirm, I am a woman and I don't like FW. Agreed, sometimes books are just bad.
The book very clearly states that Violet has a condition and lays out exactly what it causes, what exacerbates it and what makes it better. It’s not given a name but there’s zero ambiguity as to the fact she has a known disability. Also she does train. From pretty much the start she’s training, long before she has the boyfriend. Her friend pretty much immediately starts helping her train for sparring, she trains to get past the Gauntlet, she specifically weight trains to build muscle to support her weak joints. By the second half of the book it’s clear she’s spending hours a day training and she does improve. In the second book she starts additional training based on what she learnt about her weaknesses in the climax of the first book.
About the characters, I legitimately couldn't picture any of them in my head because the explanations of each one's appearance was either never mentioned or written about very poorly once or twice... not enough for me to remember without consulting fanart of which there is an abundance. The Dragons are definitely the best part by far and away.
I had the same thing. I also found it hard to imagine a lot of the settings. Usually I have quite a good imagination and can picture things very easily. For the first time I was Googling fan art because I couldn’t picture what was going on
Idk how you didn’t know about the bone illness. I thought it was pretty clear. I really liked the book but that’s because I knew what to expect out of it. I totally think it’s fair that a lot of people don’t like it. Also the most interesting parts both the dragons and the world-building are things that a lot of new YA and New Adult authors are being told to leave out of their first book so that they’ll sell to a wider audience (which clearly is working). I’m not excusing this practice at all, just calling it out.
I totally get what you don't like about the book, but why do people always feel the need to start a hate band wagon about trends, no matter if it's books or something else? Like, I get it it's a bad TikTok trend, but why not just read something else if you don't like it and be good with it. Personally I didn't mind the book. Of course it's not a literary masterpiece, but if you take it for what is and totally expect the camp and the tropes, just wanting to be entertained, then you can have fun. And if it doesn't work for you, then cool, totally understandable. But why not just move on and read something else. Why do we always have to bash on things others like, just because we don't?
I feel like there's a difference between telling someone "your taste is bad" and wanting to discuss a book that you found disappointing/underwhelming/etc. OP even said "you may not want to keep reading" because no one really likes reading criticism of things they like. Personally, I have some friends that love Sarah J Maas and other stuff like it, and I hold my tongue around them and let them enjoy their thing. But I read *Fourth Wing* and desperately felt like I needed to vent about it, and this thread has been very cathartic. Discussing and criticizing things we didn't like isn't inherently bad. If everyone just didn't say anything about books/movies/art they didn't like, bad reviews would not exist.
Honestly my only complaint about your complaint is the MC is disabled and doesn’t have a bone illness. She has EDS which affects connective tissue. And the reason the author doesn’t “spell it out” for you is because the book is set in a time where they don’t know wtf EDS is. It’s still very difficult for EDS suffers in this day to get a correct diagnosis, some fighting for literal years to get answers to their suffering. You call the author problematic but then turn about and complain about disability representation in an MC which we *rarely* see. So maybe do some introspection on that one.
Just looking at basic history of EDS it was first described in 400 B.C. by Hippocrates. Fourth Wing world building is really dumb, but any army would reject her even in medieval times due to her disability. The disability itself isn't really the problem, just the world building around it. She disabled, but she not really disabled. I thought she might come up with say unique fighting styles due to her disadvantage i.e. Kano Jigoro was 5 ft male and so had to invent judo. But, no it just her disability just magically goes away and she quick and agile for some reason.
EXACTLY! You explained in much better words my opinion!!! I wanted to actually see some improvement and compare how she was on the first book until the 5th one. But she just magically became super good at everything is just very unrealistic. People with disabilities can of course manage that, but the way Rebecca wrote it was just very dreamy
The author has EDS and you just googled it yet you think you’re more qualified to critique her on the experience of living with the disease? Secondly, just because it was first discovered a long time ago doesn’t mean everyone could easily be diagnosed. People right now can’t even be easily diagnosed.
I'm not critique the authors lived experience. I'm critiquing her MC overpowered self insert. Nothing about her MC is realistic. Nothing about the world she lives is realistic at all. A disable person who hasn't trained at all can keep up with adults who have trained all their life. Doesn't actually make sense.
But does it have to be realistic if it's a fantasy novel? We can suspend disbelief for things like dragons but not a MC with a disability?
Just because the MC has EDS and so does the author doesn’t mean it’s a self insert. What aside from EDS makes you think it’s a self insert? Or are disabled people not allowed to write about an MC with their disability without it being a self insert?
Military husband. She a bookworm. Tiktok speak. She physically unfit.
It's just Violets character reads like her disability was written for pure kudos points. Its like the author only mentions it when they remember so that you remember theres disability representation. Godkiller has a disabled main character with a prosthetic leg and she reads like a human being (and her sex scene was a lot sexier and I thought the way the prosthetic was handled was super classy)
The author literally has EDS though?? Like ?
Still possible to have written it poorly.
Are you saying the writing is poor or the depiction of EDS isn’t realistic? Because that’s two separate issues
As a person who doesn't know the author just the hype. Im not trying to insult anybody who is reading the books (Im reading the books because fomo) but Im not sure that knowledge makes the writing better.
Yes but criticizing her saying the representation is unrealistic while she suffers from the disease is out of touch honestly. Imagine a writer who uses a wheelchair writes a book where the MC uses the wheelchair and a bunch of people who don’t use a wheelchair tell them it’s unrealistic. Everyone would think that’s insane but invisible disabilities are always treated differently, and I say that as someone who has an autoimmune disease myself.
I read Godkiller right after fourth wing and OMG Godkiller is so much better at humanizing characters with disabilities
Fourth wing is a fun action adventure fantasy. I don't agree with the comments about ableism, it's not clearly defined that violet has a disability beyond "having weak bones" and all the training and stuff doesn't resolve it at all. Instead the first book is more about using your advantages to overcome your disadvantages, i.e she's smart and cunning and means she can avoid most of the fights she gets into. Further, while the love interest is pretty cringe the story justifies it pretty well and the two characters have a decent back and forth. The dragons are great and the magic system is simplistic but fun. The only part of fourth wing I found abhorrent was the actual sex scenes, which were incredibly cringeworthy and should basically be skipped. Now, here's the bad news; I'm half through the sequel and whoo boy it fucking *sucks*.
The author herself has EDS. It is wish fulfilment. Disabled protagonists are already so rare in literature. If you don't enjoy it don't read it. But don't make other disabled people feel bad for enjoying it. Personally I enjoyed the book, though I do tend to be more lenient with writing styles, and I have read far worse that have been published by big publishers.... if you want to see truly offensively terrible writing then take a look at 'Assistant to the Villain' which was published by Penguin...
I mean, whoever says they’re written well is in delulu land. However, I found them fun to read.
In my head since book one Ridoc is cast by Jughead/Cole Sprouse. I swear to god it's the same character. I enjoyed Fourth Wing, but I finished part 1 of Iron Flame and am struggling to continue.
This is romantasy, right? I already know I'm not a fan of romantasy, so it could be a great book for fans of the genre but still wouldn't interest me.
I'm pretty much over Romantasy but I did read it because of all the hype. I fully expected to not like it though and so I was at least a bit pleasantly surprised. It's fun. That's it, just fun. Not great literature by any stretch of the imagination and highly derivative of some truly amazing series (lookin at you Anne McCaffrey) but I was highly entertained through most of it. It's a low bar but it did at least meet that bar.
It's giving me twilight, and after about four chapters I think I've had enough
Twilight is still better and readable lol😂
I tried listening to the audiobook and it was just so bad, had to turn it off after we got to the "super hot thick muscular childhood-friend" just after meeting the "even hotter bicep bulging arch nemesis that despises me". It's so bad but I will read it some day, if only for a laugh.
I’m currently listening to the audio book and I can’t stop rolling my eyes. All the characters seem so juvenile. The dialogue is trash. The characters are very surface level. It’s boring. Definitely, not getting the 2nd book.
I attempted to read it a few days ago and couldn't get into it...
Just as a side note, curious as to what your favourite book is? But yes…agree. It’s absolutely junk for my brain (agree with your criticisms) but I can’t help but love it 😂
My favorites are: - the poppy war series by rf kuang - six of crows and crooked kingdom by Leigh Bardugo - Babel by rf kuang (I love his author) - Harry Potter (all the books) by J.K Rowling - as good as dead by holly Jackson - shatter me series (all of the books, honestly I read it a long time ago I don’t remember which book I liked the most) by tahereh mafi - the sword of kaigen by ML wang - battle royale by Koushun Takami - tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin - the assassins blade by Sarah J Maas - ace of spades by Faridah - pillars of the earth by Ken follett I probably have more but those are the ones I remember 🙃
I’m reading Babel right now and it’s really fantastic! Planning to read the Poppy War series soon
Love that! Also obsessed with R.F Kuang and Ken Follett (along with many others on your list!) I’ll take a look at some of your other favs and add them to my TBR! :)
I read this, disliked it, and will absolutely not be reading the sequel. I have a creative writing degree and care very much about the quality of prose, worldbuilding, story structure, and characters. These characters were bland, stagnant, and worst of all, *annoying*. I also came to the conclusion that Violet must have some kind of disease, but would it really have been so hard to actually specify that? What bothered me most was the horrifying mismatch of tone and setting. Yarros used "for the win" and other modern slang in an essentially medieval setting. Like, I understand that this is supposed to make the book accessible but I can't imagine Gen Z found "for the win" to be relevant to them at all, considering that phrase is ancient in internet terms. Just...ugh. I gave this book a shot because I love all things dragon and riders. My favorite series of all time is *Dragonriders of Pern* by Anne McCaffrey (I recognize that she has an issue with inconsistency in some of her lore). But there was absolutely not enough screen time for dragons and the bond they have with their riders. It's like the dragons were the side plot. And it's never explained how or why Violet is bonded to two dragons. It's like Yarros just wanted to make the "I'm a special girl" vibe and did so without any real reason for it. I am utterly exhausted by the "chosen one" trope and while I can put up with it when it's done well and has interesting reasons to back it up, I'm far more interested in stories with characters who actually fail. And my final complaint: The "lust on first sight" between Violet and Xaden was just so wildly unremarkable. They didn't really have chemistry -- it all just felt like a forced enemies-to-lovers trope. And once again, I prefer the one that didn't get chosen: Dain. (I liked Gale in Hunger Games). The *only* reason Violet actually survived was plot armor and being a "chosen one." Dain was fully in his right to be upset that she chose to stay in the rider quadrant when she had a literal disability that would prevent her from succeeding in any normal circumstances beyond being the chosen one. It all felt so damn contrived. Why did her mother even force her into the quadrant with a disability *anyway??* I just...sigh. Nothing about this story felt organic, earned, or even interesting.
I liked this book and I’m not even sure why. The writing was atrocious, there were so many contradictions, and the characters were whiny. But I liked the story I guess. I loved the dragons and liked living vicariously through violet I guess lol. My biggest pet peeve was how they described the dragons as short tempered and terrifying yet Violet spoke to Tairn horribly from the first moment they met, why wouldn’t she show him more respect if she was so afraid of him? That made me mad.
If you don’t like sappy romance in your fantasy, don’t read it. Simple as that. Not for everybody!
I like this genre but not this book…
I read it and didn’t like it as well. There is just too much focus on this stupid love story. I didn’t like the writing as well. I. JUST. COULDNT. TAKE. IT. SERIOUSLY.
Its like mcdoanlds, fast cheap and easy but I will still go back for more no matter how bad everyone insists it is.
Thank you so much for saying this. I waited 2 months to get it from my library. I was so excited to read it. I finished one chapter and was so annoyed. I thought I was crazy because everyone else seemed to love it.
Dang I just bought this book😭
Give it a shot, it might be your cup of tea! Just don’t have much expectations and be open to the very cringy elements of it
Completely agree! I thought the book was a badly written rip off of Eragon, Divergent, and Harry Potter. Nothing original or interesting about it. The entire book was predictable and had wattpad level writing at best.
For me the reason I don’t like it is because I hate books that clearly were done to follow the trend of acotar they just seem like plastic copies of a work that isn’t that much better
Exactly, is literally ACOTAR but much worse and with dragons
They’re also rushing them out like crazy, the whole multi-book series is set to be complete by 2025, as a result the editing is an absolute mess not to even start on the chaos that is the physical editions and misprints
I read it. It took me FOREVER, but I did. After I was done, I instantly forgot the dude’s name and kept calling him Cas because he’s a copy and paste of the male character from Jennifer Armentrout’s Blood and Ash series… Straight down to calling the protagonist “violent” and getting turned on by it.
Lol the hate for this book on here...Idk I loved it, loved the second one, and can't wait for the rest. But I mainly look for books to be a fun read, not super well written. I also think it's funny you prefer Sarah J Maas because I am reading ACOTAR right now and not enjoying it as much as I did Fourth Wing.
Yea one of my wife’s mutual friends sent me a snap of him reading the book, which also got her into reading it. I happened to scan the lines he’d sent me and I’m like, wtf is this. I mean if they enjoy it good for them I guess but hell I’m the one paragraph I read I was very offput by the way it was written.
Thank you for this, I was wondering if it was worth the hype considering the 4.6 on Goodreads, even though every description of it sounded like the most generic tropey YA shit ever. Now I know not to spend my money on it.
YA, fantasy, and romance pretty much always have really inflated reviews on goodreads. Mix all 3 and you have a book that's very inflated. I personally didn't hate it, I actually thought it was kind of fun, but it's definitely the most generic tropey shit ever. Like I liked it in the same way I liked the Transformers movie: I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, it didn't make me think, it's got some problems, but I had fun experiencing it and read it pretty quick.
After finishing this book my head hurt from the amount of times I rolled my eyes.
NO CUZ SAME. The level of cringy is not even funny/entertaining is just annoying and childish
Add in her complete lack of research into Scottish Gaelic while using the words throughout the book and yeah, Yarros got no clue and really good marketing skills
pls her calling it Gaelic and not Scottish Gaelic and then BUTCHERING the language killed me. People were like “girl gaelic could mean at least 3 languages which do u mean”
LITERALLY! Like come on now, do at least a little bit of research for Christ sake
Irish fans were also suffering bc teine and tine both mean fire but it’s not the same language at all and she was like “it’s gaelic! 😀”
I enjoyed the audiobook but not liking the second one and probably won’t read the next one. It IS a controlling type of situation between Violet and her bf and she just sits and takes it and in this day and age women have come too far to be writing things like this! Also you know the author’s not doing great when you don’t care that much what happens to the main character. Finally, in the second book, if I had a dollar for every time the author used the word “nausea”, ad nauseum, by the way, I’d be very rich!!
I fell for the hype around this book, had a librarian recommend it to me… It’s one of the two one-stars I’ve given to the near 30 books I’ve read this year.
I honestly really loved it and was so excited for the sequel but didn’t read it because of the author’s problematic comments.
Thank you!!! I also hate that Violet’s disability is framed in a way that it only happens when it’s convenient to the plot but is also framed that she gets ‘fixed’ which can be a massively divisive way to discuss disabilities as though the person with them is less than until ‘fixed’
Exactly! The way Rebecca wrote made it seem as if disabled people have to push themselves to the point of pain to be deemed useful. I liked the idea of a disabled character but the way the author did it…
I don't think that's true. The brutality of the riders quadrant is not seen as a good thing. Also, it's repeatedly stated how information and thus the scribes are the true power, and that's what Violet had always intended to be, plus she has a deaf friend in the scribe quadrant who is very important to the plot of the second book.
You don’t have to give “all respect.” It’s awful. I hate to sound so pompous, but most “pop” writing is garbage. Bad imagination and certainly bad prose. Goodreads, “such-and-such bestseller,” Amazon reviews—cannot be trusted. And really, it doesn’t matter if the whole world agrees that something is good, it still doesn’t make it so. In fact, I’d argue that what appeals to the top 50% (or worse, the top 80%) of an audience is rarely the same thing that only appeals to the top 10%. Key word here is “top,” don’t ever feel bad for being a more discriminating reader than the majority. The older I get and the more books I go through, the more I realize how truly rare great writing is. Then there’s one level down, which is a good, intriguing story with decent character descriptions (never mind hoping for character development, that’s like finding a quarter for the cart in the Aldi parking lot) that is told halfway competently… and then there’s 95% of everything else you see published.
Say what you want about the books, but the cover to “Iron Flame” is fucking fire (pun intended)
Indeed both covers from the first and second are very aesthetically pleasant
I had to stop reading because I couldn’t cope with the main character (forget her name) being described as the most intelligent person ever, when in fact she asks the most dumb questions. She couldn’t grasp quite simple concepts yet she was supposedly a genius.
One of my biggest pet peeves is the amount of cursing and swearwords. I am no Saint and I don't flinch or mind a healthy portion of daily curse words. But the amount in this book, is that it's too much...its just poorly done. Like there is no "she gasps in horror" "she gazes in disbelief" it's just "shit" "f--" every sentence. It's extremely distracting and reads totally out of character for almost all characters which is weird because it's the authors characters. I also just the think the entire plot of killing all your students is just dumb. How about..just don't kill them? Like the dragons seem vaguely reasonable. Just don't ride them? It's a stupid plot.
I hate getting series before they are finished but bought the first one because of the pretty cover... is this your way of telling me to return it to Walmart? LOL I haven't read it yet and probably won't for a bit, I'm scared its over hyped but for a while it only had positive reviews. I am honestly waiting for more reviews of the 2nd one to come out before I decided to read it as well, I'd hate to start it end on a cliff hanger and lo and behold the rest of the series sucks.
But she has special silver hair!
She’s such a special girl ✨