The Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros is one of the hottest book right now. I listened to the book and fell in love with it. In this book review, I want to go through what the book is about and what I learned from it.
Fourth Wing is about 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail who has been trained to be a scribe all her life. Her father was a part of the Scribe Quadrant, which meant he studied history and books, and her mother Commanding General of the Riders Quadrant. When it’s Conscription Day, Violet’s orders her to seek entry into the elite (dragon) Riders Quadrant.
One lesson from the introduction of the book is that the fact that Violet has been trained to be a scribe all her life and is thrown into dragon rider training instead contributes with a lot of tension and conflict early on in the story. I also think that there is a clear internal and external conflict that drives the main character and the story forward, in a good way.
When Violet goes through tests to see if she can become a dragon trainer, she saves the life of another girl by lending her one of her shoes. She makes other selfless choices later in the book that make me a a reader very sympathetic towards her.
I also found Violet and Xaden’s romance interesting. Who doesn’t like the enemy to lover trope?
As for the world the book is set in, there is a conflict between the two kingdoms of Navarre. Tyrrendor, where the protagonist is located, is the larger and has dragon riders protecting the borders. Poromeil is a smaller kingdom where the military ride griffins instead of dragons. As with dragons, griffins connect to their riders and can communicate with them through a mental bond. On the periphery, there’s also the wyvern, which is some sort of larger dragon, and the venin, who are former humans… which I think will have bigger roles in future books.
Spoiler alert. At the end of the book, the main character wakes up in a city thought to be destroyed and meets his brother who was thought to be dead. Xaden has lied to Violet and everything she thought she knew has turned out to be a lie… Yarros ends the book with a real cliffhanger which makes me want to read the next book.
Something I learned from the ending was that it’s good to answer some of the questions that the reader is given at the beginning of the book, but that new ones can come up and that helps to keep the tension up throughout the manuscript. I have some kind of love-hate relationship with cliffhangers, but I think it works well in this script. Although I wish it could have ended a little better.
Something I learned from the ending was that it’s good to answer some of the questions that the reader gets at the beginning of the story, but new questions can appear which helps keep some of the tension throughout the story. I have some kind of love-hate relationship with cliffhangers, but I think it works well in this script. Although I wish it could have ended a little better.
A spontaneous thought I have while writing this review is that I actually wish I had read the physical book instead of the audiobook. It is much easier to remember things if you can highlight passages from the book, which I do in physical and digital books.
What did you think of this book? Did you learn anything from it?
