Early this year, this book was blowing up everywhere. Booktok wouldn't shut up about it, neither would bookstagram. Now, I want to believe that at this stage of your reading journey, you know what books you like and what books you don't like. Fourth Wing is the type of YA? New Adult? fantasy I don't roll with, but when you have access to Library books (Thank you Libby) and you can satisfy your curiousity without breaking the bank....well, you read the book.

Now, I know no-one picked up this book expecting it to be the pinnacle of literary greatness, (If you did, then that's on you) but wow! Ms. Yarros did not even try to bring anything to the table. It's like she read SJM's House of Earth and Blood and went "Oh. I can get these characters to say fuck a bunch of time and have sex and voilà you've got a book.

World building zero... Yarros could not be bothered to explain the world beyond there's a war college and people ride dragons. How do people who do not ride dragons get about? Your guess is as good as mine. For some reason their calender is exactly like real world calender but there's never any mention of the year. When did the unification happen? oh like 400 years ago.
The magic, characters got from their dragons was really just anything that will help the plot progress. Apparently you could get the same dragon but what magic you manifested was really up in the wind so yeah...

Also for a nation that was at war, it made absolutely no sense the way they kept killing off people. I mean it wasn't like they were growing people. Riders mortality rate was pretty high & even procreation amongst riders was strictly monitored. There's a part in the book where it's specifically stated that they are short on people:

"You have noticed that the graduating classes from the Riders Quadrant are diminishing every year, while the uptick in the attacks has cost us another seven riders and their dragons this year, haven't you? It takes at least a full company of infantry to make up for the loss of one rider"

Maybe the author thought it would be more dramatic but it just honestly shows how the author wasn't thinking about anything beyond Xaden and Violet boning each other to stupor.
Side note: The quote mentions infantry but at no point in this book is there any inkling that their army consists of anything more than dragon riders.

Also my gooodness!!! How bad can your vocabulary be that everything is punctuated by either fuck, fucking, fucked, badass, motherfucker. I really do not get this trend of having characters vocabulary in this genre especially constantly peppered with quite frankly inspid swear words. Does it make the characters more adult? Do authors really have no way of letting characters get their point across without all the swear words? Or are these authors just bad at writing?

The main character Violet was just lol. I mean obviously she has to survive but c'mon at least make her trials and tribulations believable. Do you know what it means for someone to have brittle bones? Do you know what it means to have broken bones? I really would have preferred that she have another handicap but that because are you kidding me? They could have snapped her like a twig. But she's the main character so don't let that obviously fatal handicap to anyone else but Violet bother you. To tell you how for lack of a better word, desperate the author was for drama, she wrote this ridiculous fight between the 2 main leads. How do you expect someone you just started dating to tell you every secret the person has? And I mean that in the literal sense of the word that they just started dating. The time between the argument of "you didn't trust me enough to tell me all your secrets" and when they finally started dating was literally hours. Also, never mind that the secret didnt just pertain to him but the lives of others.
Like c'mon Ms. Yarros. C'mon!!

Also not sure why people had it out for Dain. The character was badly and I mean badly written. I mean who acts so negative about their supposed best friend right at the bat? And every freaking time? The author just wanted a villain right at the go & apparently wasting space on that cartoonish Jack Barlowe character wasn't enough.

This book was just lol in fact, what even is the point of this book?
Oh yeah.. Points for the sex scene even though it felt violent as hell. They were clearly starved for sex.

Anyways, let's give a standing ovation to the marketing team of this book. The devil works hard but Ms. Yarros's publishing marketing team obviously works harder. & you know what? I totally respect that.
But damn though, i feel like SJM puts out on average better plots than this and that's saying a lot cos she isn't that great in my opinion. ⭐.75 stars